Nathaniel Brown, a logistics manager from Wilmington, Delaware, booked a flight on a whim to visit his sister in Orlando.
For months, it was not possible to book a flight out of Delaware — it was the only state in the U.S. without commercial air service. Instead, local travelers had drive to nearby cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.
However, on Wednesday, Brown was one of the passengers boarding Avelo Airlines’ first flight from Wilmington.
The carrier’s arrival there will give Delaware its first commercial passenger flight in nearly seven months. A number of other carriers — including Delta Air Lines and Frontier Airlines — have come and gone in recent years. Now, Avelo and local officials hope the state can shake that dubious track record for good.
Avelo’s Orlando service that began Wednesday is the first of five routes to Florida that the airline is adding at Wilmington Airport (ILG). Other new routes coming this month are to Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Tampa and West Palm Beach.
Avelo founder and CEO Andrew Levy believes the carrier can be successful in Delaware despite the market’s checkered record of airline service.
He’s betting on a formula that focuses on nonstop flights to popular leisure markets. To get started, Avelo will base one of its 737s in Wilmington, making it the airline’s fourth base alongside Burbank, California; New Haven, Connecticut; and Orlando.
“What we’re doing is just simply different than what anybody else has done to my knowledge,” Levy said about his carrier’s plans for Wilmington in an interview with TPG ahead of the inaugural. “We’re putting an airplane in there with our own people, the airplane’s gonna live there. It’s gonna come home there every night.”
The decision to launch flights from Delaware largely mirrors what Avelo has done at its base at Tweed New Haven Airport (HVN) — previously a little-used airport that sits in a dense population corridor. Avelo has launched flights from the airport mostly to leisure destinations – routes where the carrier has no direct competition since it is the only airline there.