Want to get from Connecticut to LaGuardia Airport faster? Delta Airlines has a flight for that — and it quietly unveiled a new route from Bradley International Airport to do it.
The service will begin daily starting Sept. 6, and it will be Delta’s shortest route at 101 miles. Travel blog The Points Guy reports that “Delta Connection partner Endeavor Air will operate the 101-mile route using a CRJ-900 regional jet on up to three daily frequencies.”
Twitter user Hayden Clarkin, the self-titled “Transit Guy,” tweeted about the new route taking off from the Windsor Locks airport to the Queens destination.
Clarkin’s tweet, which has garnered more than 1,400 likes since publishing Monday morning, pointed out that “rail connections are not competitive enough to not allow this policy failure to happen.” It also drew attention to the route that is seemingly in direct competition with train travel.
Transport Research — an account dedicated to the “research and evaluation of transportation policy and planning,” according to its Twitter bio — was among the first to respond to Clarkin with a map of train routes. It also pointed out that “many users of the Hartford airport are from western Massachusetts or Vermont,” areas with no airports, according to Transport Research’s tweet, which makes for a “considerable pre-flight drive” to get to New Haven’s Union Station to take an Amtrak train to LaGuardia.
Others that responded to Clarkin’s tweet commented on the flight’s short travel distance, with one person noting that he biked from New York City to New Haven and to Northampton, Mass, “which is 35 miles north of the Hartford airport.” Another mentioned that her sister lives in Hartford and “it’s impossible to get there from Long Island or NYC” and it “takes 3-4 trains and an Uber” to do so.
Flights are already available for the Bradley-to-LaGuardia route. As of June 13, flights available on Sept. 6 to the Queens airport start at $238 for main cabin seating, and the non-stop flights are an average of one hour in duration. While there are no direct Amtrak trains that travel to LaGuardia, trains from Hartford to Penn Station on Sept. 6 start at $17 for coach seating; travel time is around three hours. Travelers using Amtrak would then have to take a subway, an Uber or a cab from Penn Station to get to LaGuardia.
The latest Delta addition joins an onslaught of new routes launching from both Bradley International Airport and Tweed New Haven Regional Airport in recent months. Bradley’s Breeze Airways just unveiled seven new routes from the Windsor Locks airport, while fellow budget airline Avelo began offering flights to Chicago and North Carolina starting in May.