This appears to be a good year so far for a Bradley International Airport.
After four years of shedding passengers from 2005 to 2009 and a minor recovery last year, the airport saw a steep ascent in the first six months of 2011. The increase came after the airport in Windsor Locks added new airlines and destinations over the past 12 months.
For the first six months of 2011, passenger enplanements and deplanements increased 8.9 percent to 2.8 million passengers from 2.6 million passengers for the first six month in 2010.
This year’s increase came after the airport had a record 7.2 million passengers for all year 2005 and then lost passengers every year before bottoming out at 5.3 million passengers in 2009. That was a 26 percent decline over those four years.
Bradley saw its fortunes start to turn at the end of 2010, thanks to two new airlines flying out of the airport – JetBlue Airlines and Frontier Airlines – in addition to several new non-stop routes, including Denver and New York City. Because of that late year turnaround, the airport saw a modest increase in passenger traffic for the entire year 2010, rising 2 percent to 5.4 million passengers.
Coupling the late 2010 boost with the first six months of 2011, Bradley Airport had 12 straight months of increasing passenger counts ending in June. From July 2010 to June 2011, the airport had a 9 percent increase in passengers, rising to 5.6 million compared to the 5.2 million passengers from July 2009 to June 2010.
The airport still needs to finish this year to make it the year of a recovery. The facility hasn’t added a new route since Southwest Airlines’ Fort Lauderdale destination in November, and Frontier Airlines announced it will pull out of Bradley in September. The next new route will be JetBlue’s non-stop to San Juan, Puerto Rico starting in January.
“We continue to take positive steps to maximize Bradley’s full potential, and I really feel the sky’s the limit,” Sen. John A. Kissel, R-Enfield, who represents four towns that border the airport. “Our collective goal is to make Bradley a bigger player in the region, and the investments being made there are going to bring tremendous results.”
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