Constanza Rosas stepped out of T.F. Green Airport in mid-January, exhausted from a series of flights. She carried two suitcases, a bright-pink neck pillow and the trappings of the pandemic-era traveler. In addition to a full-face shield, she wore a surgical face mask over an N95 mask.
Her flight from Charlotte, N.C., was the last leg of a three-stop journey that had started with an eight-hour flight from Santiago, Chile, to Miami.
Tested and found negative for COVID-19 three days prior, she was nervous throughout the journey. “I was afraid of COVID,” she said. “I was like this on the plane because I was scared,” she said, tightly tucking in her arms.
Rosas overcame the fear and had made it to Rhode Island, ready to begin a two-week quarantine and then an au pair job in Barrington. A member of her host family picked her up at the Warwick airport.
How willing others will be to brave the dangers and hassles of air travel during a pandemic, including public health protocols, will help determine how soon T.F. Green rebounds from a potentially devastating collapse in air travel last year.
While the final numbers are still being collected, airport management expects to see a 67% decline in passenger boardings for 2020, compared with the prior year. About 1.3 million travelers passed through the airport last year, down from nearly 4 million in 2019.
All airports in New England have suffered similar declines. But in one critical week recently – the holiday week ending Jan. 3 – Green outperformed Logan International Airport in Boston, reporting a 60% decline year-over-year compared with Logan’s 65% drop.
The final week of the year was an improvement over December, when a preliminary count had 79,468 people flying in and out of the airport, a 76% decline over December 2019.
Such steep declines have been commonplace since last March, when COVID-19’s presence in the U.S. made people fearful of traveling by airplane. Total passenger counts at Green plummeted by nearly half that month, from 278,354 to 161,940. In April, the airport hit its low point, with just 10,306 travelers passing through its gates.
There was a resurgence of passengers, starting in May and through the summer, but with the second wave of infections in the fall and domestic travel restrictions and quarantine requirements, the numbers sank again.
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FEELING HEADWINDS: Jeremy Delfino, general manager at Chelo’s in Warwick near T.F. Green Airport, says his restaurant has seen a 20% decline in business since last spring, including seeing far fewer uniformed pilots and flight attendants inside. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
‘YEARS TO GET BACK’
On a recent January day, the airport and surrounding areas looked desolate. The InterLink parking garage on Jefferson Boulevard had fewer than 15 cars. The airport’s long-term lot was empty. The short-term parking area was one-third full.
Inside the airport, about two dozen people – wearing masks and keeping their distance from one another – waited quietly for their bags at one of the carousels on the ground floor.
Momentum in rebuilding the passenger counts is inextricably tied to the course of the pandemic, says Iftikhar Ahmad, CEO and president of the R.I. Airport Corp., which operates Green.
“As the U.S. completes its vaccinations, hopefully by the end of the summer or early fall, it will instill confidence in traveling again,” he said. “But it will take years to get back to our 2019 passenger numbers.”
Even more so than in prior years, the issue is not so much the availability of efficient aircraft or flights to far-flung locations at the state’s largest airport, but demand.
Ahmad and aviation analysts say a portion of business travel may never come back. The pandemic forced many companies to quickly employ technology that makes meetings easier and more efficient, using low- or no-cost online platforms.
Michael Boyd, president of Colorado-based Boyd Group International Inc. and an airline consultant who has worked with Green, expects as much as 10% of business travel won’t return.
“We meet, we talk, we share notes [online],” he said. “That means I don’t have to get on an airplane for 10 hours of travel time for a two-hour meeting. It was going to come anyway, but this just accelerated the process.”
The negative effects on international travel might be lasting, too. While Green has had limited connections to destinations outside the United States, it was an area the airport was trying to strengthen in recent years, after an extended runway in 2017 allowed for larger, long-range jets. COVID-19 has stopped those efforts. And the disappearance of international travelers has impacted domestic flights, Ahmad said. One-quarter of all boardings in the U.S. relate directly or indirectly to international travel, he said.
“One of the things that is going to be important, besides how quickly the U.S. gets the vaccinations completed, is how soon the rest of the world can pull out of this pandemic,” Ahmad said. “For example, if the [United Kingdom] is closed, or if Africa is closed, it is going to impact those international numbers. So, we are going to be dependent on that recovery also.”
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STEEP DIVE When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, the number of passengers arriving and departing from T.F. Green Airport plummeted by almost half compared with a month earlier. Things grew much worse in April, when the airport recorded an average of about 340 passengers a day. By comparison, Green averaged 11,240 daily passengers in April 2019. / Source: T.F. Green Airport, using passenger data reported by airlines. Figures for December 2020 are preliminary.
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How long will it take? Years, based on the upheaval to aviation caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the Great Recession a decade ago.
In both cases, airports in major hubs such as Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Boston recovered in about four years, Ahmad said. Smaller airports, such as Green, potentially face a 10-year recovery, he said.
“A lot of things are interconnected in the economy,” Ahmad said. “When the economy comes in and starts taking momentum, the aviation industry would mimic that.”
That said, Ahmad sees reasons to be encouraged once the pandemic passes. The worldwide population is increasing, which will affect international travel. And more people are moving from large cities, such as Boston and New York, to less-densely populated areas, including Rhode Island.
MIXED SIGNALS
In some small ways, there are signs of recovery at Green.
Right now, 10 airlines are offering flights at the airport. And Delta Air Lines Inc. is scheduled to restart daily service to Atlanta in March after it suspended flights out of Rhode Island last April.
“They could have been back by December, but you know we were No. 1 in the nation at that time,” Ahmad said of Rhode Island’s sky-high infection rate.
But while planes are returning to Green, the passengers are only filling about two-thirds of the seats, in part to allow for social distancing. Such a low “load factor” makes it difficult for airlines to turn a profit on flights, which in turn makes it difficult to justify scheduling more flights.
JetBlue Airways, United Airlines Inc. and Frontier Airlines suspended operations briefly last spring when passenger traffic dwindled to just a few hundred travelers a day. JetBlue and Frontier resumed their flights last summer, and United started again in October. Air Canada, a seasonal carrier, didn’t fly out of Green in 2020 and is evaluating whether it will return this summer, said John Goodman, a spokesman for Green.
The number of regular flights has varied across the past nine months, but for most of the fall and into the early winter, the carriers provided only about one-third of their previous numbers, he said.
When demand comes back, the airlines will respond, Ahmad insisted.
“Airlines are chomping at the bit,” he said. “It’s the passengers that are missing.”
One bright spot: cargo. By weight, cargo volume has increased every month for the past year, according to Goodman. More than 17 million pounds of goods moved through Green in 2020, up 14% from 2019, in part because the pandemic spurred a shift from ocean shipping to air freight but also due to increased online sales, according to aviation consultants.
“I don’t want to go to a department store. Go online and get it tomorrow,” Boyd said. “That was in place before the COVID-19 restrictions, it’s just been accelerated.”
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THIN LINE: The security checkpoint at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick has been quieter during the coronavirus pandemic, as passenger traffic has dropped substantially after flights were pulled by major carriers and travel restrictions were implemented in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
‘SYMBIOTIC’ RELATIONSHIPS
On the ground, R.I. Airport Corp. has navigated the coronavirus crisis without laying off or furloughing any of its 150 employees. Others haven’t been so fortunate. According to the quasi-public state agency, contractors, vendors and airlines employed 1,642 people at Green as of January, 275 fewer than 12 months earlier.
To help make ends meet, the airport corporation has reduced its budgeted operating expenses by 14% for fiscal 2021 to $27.4 million. The agency also received $24 million in federal COVID-19 relief, which will allow Green to defray the financial burden of airlines leasing its terminal space for the next three years.
Although airlines received their own federal aid, the airport’s funding had to be spent on reducing operating costs for air carriers. In exchange, airlines were required to provide minimum levels of service to those airports, Goodman said.
Meanwhile, the impact of a desolate airport radiates beyond its terminal. A slow comeback for the air hub will mean reduced revenue coming into Warwick and surrounding communities.
The state’s convention and tourism business is reliant on Green having available flights to and from major hubs. And, in turn, those sectors feed demand to establish flights.
In 2020, the convention and large-events industry collapsed because of the pandemic and stringent crowd limits. Conventions in Providence are no longer providing the airport with passengers.
“The relationship between the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau and the airport is very symbiotic,” said Kristen Adamo, bureau CEO and president. “We need them to have the right air lift and direct routes to make us attractive, but then we also need to bring in business that will support that kind of air lift. It’s a mutually beneficial sort of relationship.”
Adamo sees hope on the horizon if the pandemic fades quickly enough. “We have a nice chunk of business on the books for 2022, ’23, ’24,” she said. “We have enough where if the vaccines work and we continue to get back to normal, then we’ll be able to start ramping up again.”
Edinaldo Tebaldi, a professor of economics at Bryant University, says the airport is essential infrastructure, as important to the state’s economy as its deep-water ports. With every disruption, the economy is jolted.
“The economy is becoming more integrated, by becoming part of a supply chain, by buying, or shipping goods overseas,” he said. “Airports are a strategic asset in the supply chain. If we hope to be at the frontier of technological development, if we hope to be an innovative economy, we need to be connected in these networks.”
The pain is also being felt just a few hundred yards off the end of Green’s runways.
Several restaurants along the throughfares surrounding Green have seen sparse evidence of air travelers in their establishments.
At Chelo’s of Warwick Inc., located across the street from the Post Road entrance to Green Airport, General Manager Jeremy Delfino reported a 20% decline in business. While some of that can be attributed to the pandemic depressing inside sales, he has seen far fewer uniformed pilots and flight attendants since last spring. The same goes for diners telling the wait staff they need to watch the time or miss a flight.
“The airport definitely affects my restaurant,” Delfino said.
“It’s empty, as you can see at this point,” he said one recent afternoon, pointing to a few diners. “You would normally have a lot of people picking up or dropping off people at the airport.”
A short distance away, just outside the airport terminal, three cab drivers waited in their cars, eyeing the front doors for passengers who might need a lift.
Already hit by the ride-sharing industry, the cabbies said the pandemic has been devastating to their businesses.
Ali Osman, a cab driver for 21 years, said he’s lost more than half his income since before the pandemic. He now drives his cab an extra day each week, hoping to close the shortfall. It hasn’t made much difference.
“I have to do that, but there is no work anywhere,” he said. “We come here. We first have to pay for the parking. We go to the train station, but nobody travels anymore. So, we make $40, $50, sometimes $100. In order to make money, I have to be on the road.”
Osman, a one-man business who owns On Time Taxi, is maintaining his car, keeping up with insurance payments and making do with the help of savings and his wife’s income. He sees an end when everyone “gets vaccinated – and gets over that coronavirus.”
“Hopefully, everything gets back to normal. I just hope for that,” he said.
Mary MacDonald is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Macdonald@PBN.com.