Last month, I was delighted to hear that Bangor International Airport will add three new cities to its growing list of nonstop destinations later this year. This new service, coupled with the stupendous transformation of the terminal’s first floor in 2016, proves that the Queen City is becoming more accessible to the world, and the world is becoming more accessible to the Queen City.
Yet despite these promising advancements, we are still missing a vital connection to our closest major metropolitan area: Boston.
It’s odd these days to think of moving backward in terms of mobility. We talk of hyperloops and levitating trains, of supersonic jets and rockets. Our dreams reside in connectivity and speed. Yet in 2009, when flights to Boston ceased, Bangor took a step backward. To be fair, any airport that loses service to a city experiences such a regression, but having lost service to Boston for so many years is especially sad.
I remember taking the late-night American Eagle jet from a tidy satellite terminal in Logan. It always comforted me to see my city on the departure board. After clambering into the mosquito-esque plane, the flight ended almost as quickly as it began. Fifty minutes is all it took to touch down in Bangor.
Compare that today to riding the bus, which can take up to 6 hours, depending on the company. Flying is no longer a viable option: the shortest flight time now from Bangor to Boston, on United, is 3 hours and 49 minutes, with an impossible 44-minute connection in Newark, New Jersey. Combined with check-in and security waiting times, this is practically the same duration as riding the bus. The price is also ridiculous.
But shorter travel times are not the only thing Bangor has lost since the late 1990s and early 2000s. On any given weekday in 1999, Business Express ran hourly service from our airport to Logan, starting at 5:20 a.m. and ending after 7 p.m. US Airways ran an additional eight flights, culminating in service every half hour at peak times (view the complete 1999 schedule here).
Today, only five Concord Coach Lines and two Greyhound buses make the trek south on a daily basis, comprising Bangor’s only direct service to Boston.
When the last Boston flights ended in 2009, Delta — their remaining operator — was only running a meager two flights per day. At the cusp of the recession, when the airport “was starting to reverse some passenger trends,” according to Airport Director Tony Caruso, the news was a “disappointment.” Although Bangor International Airport has since expanded service to a variety of destinations, the Boston flights have yet to return.
I wonder, with our traditional airlines failing to restart service, if regional carriers like Cape Air or Pen Air (having spread to several smaller Maine towns), might want to try Bangor.
I’ll admit that maybe I’m too young to remember when Bangor would see a commercial flight every hour, but re-discovering this chapter in Bangor’s aviation history surprised me. And of what I do remember, I remember fondly: my mother and I running down the corridor, minutes before the gate was supposed to close. A flight attendant with a thick Maine accent would tell us to calm down — he’d make sure the door stayed open for us. We’d board the mosquito, and about an hour later we’d be home.
Maybe I was just lucky, but I don’t remember any pilot on those flights mispronouncing our city’s name. I can’t say that’s the case anymore, despite our best efforts.
I understand, however, why short hop services such as Bangor to Boston get cut, and I am here less to demand but more to lament and reflect. These types of decisions have always been up to the airline. The airport is not to blame. Bangor offers a far wider range of destinations now than it did 20 years ago and on much larger aircraft. But the flexibility and frequency of service is not the same.
Even if a single, affordable flight from Boston were to land on our runway, I would consider it a wonderful improvement. It would be the next step in a series of exciting developments for Bangor’s airspace.
Until then, Boston, our grand city to the south, sits in an odd space — the epitome of being “so close, yet so far.”
Andrew Sandweiss is a Bangor native and current architecture student at Yale University, where he recently produced an exhibition on the global impact of budget airlines.
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