View From The Terminal: Pleased & Pissed Off

Chris Smith, from Meriden, had his flight out of Tweed to Charlotte cancelled at the last minute, got little help on site, and he was number 71 waiting on his telephone for customer service for rebooking or refund.

Hamdenite Anna Collins, on the other hand, was over the moon at how smooth her flight was back from Houston, where she was visiting her grandmother. Leaving from Tweed instead of Newark saved her hours of travel with two rambunctious little ones, and the price was right. Amazing, she quietly declared.

That was part of the busy scene on a recent afternoon at Tweed-New Haven Regional Airport (HVN).

Between those two poles of pleasure and pain was also a range of views on the flying experience courtesy of the two discount carriers, Avelo and Breeze, in and out of the rapidly growing Morris Cove airport.

On Thursday at around 3:45 p.m., Kaye Pugh was waiting patiently for her ride back to Waterbury and leaning against a pole where the single entry lane to the airport for drop off and pick up curves around in front of the main entrance to the terminal.

She was relaxed and everything was more than okay about her flying in moments before on Avelo from Florida. She had gone to visit relatives in Myrtle Beach, she said, and the price one-way was $172. She said it was her second time using the airline and the airport and ​“I’ve never been unhappy.”

“I like smaller, friendlier airports,” she said, as well as smaller airlines. The larger airlines, she said, may provide you with free food, ​“but they treat you like crap.”

The only downside is that the smaller airlines like Avelo and Breeze — the only commercial carriers currently using Tweed — fly only on certain days.

That basically was the same experience of another passenger, a young woman standing inside the small vestibule of the terminal, who did not want to give her name because she had taken a personal day in order to make the flight to Charleston, South Carolina on Breeze. It was leaving at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday and she was waiting, with her shiny blue carry-on beside her, for a friend to join.

“I’m fairly positive,” she said, about the Tweed experience, although, like Pugh, she noted that flights are not every day from every city ​“and you need to plan strategically.”

When this reporter mentioned that quite a few people seemed the opposite, ranging from unhappy to angry, as Avelo’s flight 1195 to North Carolina had been cancelled due, apparently, to foggy conditions, she was not surprised.

As a kid growing up in the area, she remembered listening to music on the radio and hearing reports of fog-ins. There was even some local running joke about someone being elected mayor of the foggy area. Foggeria?

But that didn’t mollify Chris Smith and his wife Keisha, who hail from Meriden.

They were waiting, leaning against the temporary trailer-like buildings adjacent to the terminal that the two airlines use for baggage check-in. 

At 3:33 they received an email-message, long after having checked in, that their 4:20 Avelo flight to North Carolina was cancelled due to heavy fog in New Haven.

Smith was calling the friend who had dropped them off to turn around and come back to pick them up to return to Meriden, as Smith said there was no one available from Avelo on site to help either with re-booking or the status of their bags. So they may as well go right home.

It was a red line that Avelo had crossed as far as the Smith family was concerned. 

Their only previous time using Avelo and Tweed, said Keisha Smith, was a year ago, also a flight from North Carolina, into Tweed, but that flight too had issues. 

It was diverted from landing at New Haven and touched down instead in Albany. There, Smith reported no help was given in finding lodging for the night. He Ubered and found lodging on his own, and although Avelo told him subsequently that they would refund those unexpected expenses, and to send in his receipts, the communications were glue‑y and over time he eventually gave up.

Now he reported he was number 71 waiting on line to speak with Avelo customer service.

He said, with a certain exhausted generosity, that he had overheard another passenger from his canceled flight had paid $150 for an Uber to take her to the airport.

Chris Smith asserted that he noticed two other planes taking off in the fog and insisted that if that were the case, why not his flight? 

From now he said, it’s going to be Bradley.

New Haven truck driver Anthony Goethe was also inconvenienced by the cancellation of the 4:20 flight, but more resigned, even accepting that this is the way it is with a small airport and a small airline.

A more regular traveler, he had used Avelo and Tweed already seven or eight times and ​“I’ve never had a problem until today.”

However, he was a little ticked, he added, that ​“they didn’t tell you anything until a half hour before the flight” was to leave.

Not as inconvenienced as the Smith family, because he said he has a house both in North Carolina and New Haven, he said he had no doubt he’d be using the airport and the carrier again.

There’s a perception out there – at least this reporter has it – that because Tweed is small, wait times for check in and security should not be a problem, and so that strict adherence to the suggested pre-flight arrival time doesn’t have to be strictly adhered to.

That turned out to be the reason that Joseph Munroe, a very pissed off traveler, had missed his 2:35 flight to Wilmington, North Carolina.

A first-time user of the airport, he sought out this reporter to tell his tale. A construction manager, he needed to get the afternoon flight because people were waiting to meet him, and a project had to be managed. 

He said he arrived at the airport at about 1:05 for the 2:35 flight, and proceeded to go through the check-in-and security, but then ​“the door was slammed in my face.” 

Chain-smoking and agitated, he said the next flight to Wilmington that he could catch would be on the weekend, his business was going to suffer, and he blamed it on understaffing at the airport, among other issues. 

He said signage was also unclear, along with disorganization. ​“It’s a small airport trying to be a big one,” he concluded.

Yet a young airport employee, who preferred not to be identified, had a much simpler explanation. ​“People who get ​‘a door slammed in their face,’ he politely explained, ​“didn’t arrive in time.”

The recommendation is to arrive at minimum two hours ahead of take-off time.

Click here for a previous story about the huge expansion of the use of Tweed New Haven Airport since 2021 when the discount airline Avelo made HVN its hub and with the recent addition of flights by Breeze. 

And here for the ongoing complaints of East Shore residents about noise, pollution, illegal street and on-private-property parking, and other quality of life irritations, accompanying the slow roll-out of new airport infrastructure, such as the proposed new terminal on the East Haven side of the facility.

In the meantime, Anna Collins’s husband had just pulled up, retrieving the family’s white SUV from the parking lot ($5 an hour/$35 a day), and they were loading the kids. 

It was the end of a long travel day, which might have been a lot longer, and the kids had finally met their great grandmother in Houston, and it would be now only a relatively short ride back to Hamden.