This category of blog post usually features such large scale airports such as Heathrow, Lisbon, Newark, Miami etc. These airports are universally known and loathed in equal amounts. With big airports, come big problems, but as we recently learned, small airports can manage to create problems of their own.

Historically, a small airport can be an enjoyable experience for me. The ratio of bathrooms to passengers is often favorable and they tend to be well-cleaned as well. Security is usually not a headache, but the officials due tend to be a bit more thorough (presumably due to a lack of things to do). But New Haven’s Tweed Airport certainly bucks the trend. It is the worst small airport I have ever flown out of in my life.

New Haven’s first issue is that this airport shouldn’t even exist for commercial flights. It is situated next to a body of water that as our ticket agent told us — creates a lot of fog especially in the winter. Places have weather. That’s not all that crazy. What is crazy is having an airport in a place that has aforementioned weather and not having enough suitable instrument approach options to allow aircraft to land there during these times.

The New Haven airport currently hosts commercial flights from just two airlines — Avelo and Breeze. If you’ve never heard of either of them, you could easily be forgiven. Their business models revolve around connecting two cities that no other airline would dare bother with. Thusly, they don’t have to worry about competition on their routes, except from each other. There are a few problems with this. One — New Haven, population 130,000, is a de facto hub for at least Avelo, which doesn’t make a ton of sense. Secondly, I wouldn’t put a ton of confidence in either of these airlines having a profitable or sustainable future to justify investing into airport expansions. This brings us back to the sad state of affairs at Tweed.

Its airport “terminal” (a generous term) is really just a series of glorified shipping containers interconnected to create some semblance of a structure. When delays mount, this model becomes a disaster. There isn’t adequate space inside the small interior to accommodate multiple flights. Passengers will not even be allowed to go through security until their flight is close to boarding. This requires that they wait outside. When we were there, the temperature was about 30 degrees with a light drizzle — not a great time to be stuck outside. We hid out in the baggage claim area (a separate building) and frankly not well heated either.

There was no food in the area to sustain ourselves despite wandering the neirhborhood in search of an Italian deli (that was closed). Eventually I settled on one guy in a food truck selling overpriced empanadas. He knows what he has and can probably charge whatever he wants. Eventually some airport employees tracked us down to tell us our flight was about to board, so we could go through security.

Security emptied into a clostrophobic’s nightmare. There were no places to go that would be out of the way. It would be a horrendous place for a fire to break out and doubtful that it’s even up to code in the first place. Eventually our flight boarded, and while we had decent seats in an exit row thanks to being standbys, your average Avelo passenger gets no relief on an airline that offers few no perks — not even a water service.

The Tweed airport is planning to expand, but should it? Its longevity is hitched to the success of an airline like Avelo, which is frankly not very good. At best, New Haven should have maybe a few flights a day connecting it to Boston or New York and nothing else. Is there a large market for people going from New Haven to Jacksonville, Florida? I can’t imagine. Fortunately for you, dear reader, the odds of you needing to fly in or out of Tweed is pretty slim — which is what makes it all the more shocking that a thousand people were at this tiny airport the day I was there.

At the risk of vomiting in my own mouth, I have to admit I may have actually been easier and less stressful to fly out of . . . Newark. God help us.