The late August afternoon was cool and partly cloudy. At the Hancock County-Bar Harbor Airport my son and I were waiting by the fence next to the terminal for the arrival of the Cape Air flight from Boston.
My son could even wave to the pilot as the Cessna 402 taxied in.
Such are the joys of small airports where the a view of the ramp is often mere steps from the terminal. These portals to the world are often some of the best airport adaptations of the local architectural vernacular, from Santa Barbara’s Spanish Colonial Revival terminal by PMSM Architects (opened 2011) to Nantucket’s shingled, Cape Cod-style terminal by HNTB (opened 1992) and Charlottesville’s Jeffersonian rotunda by O’Brien Atkins (opened 1991). They can also be among the worst — folding chairs in the Morgantown airport’s DMV-like waiting area, for example.
But despite their near universal lack of fancy amenities or posh lounges, some of my best travel travel experiences were at small airports.
The beauty of small airports is their ease. One can roll up minutes before a flight, check in, clear security — or not if you’re flying on a domestic flight in, say, Iceland or New Zealand — and board your plane. And, to be honest, you often don’t want to be there too early given the general lack of amenities.
That is unless you want to snag the right-seat on a Star Marianas (or Cape Air) flight. Seating is first come, first served.
The design of these terminals is often simple. Some are great reflections of their local architectural heritage while others are more utilitarian. And, when done well, small airports can do a lot with limited means.
Take Bar Harbor’s airport. It was renovated and expanded by Lewis + Malm Architecture in 2014 with a new departure hall that, as the firm’s president Charles Earley told me, includes a glass curtain wall with panoramic views and wood planking tying the new and old sections of the building together.
And who doesn’t love the exposed glulams and structural elements reminiscent of a suburban nature center? It’s certainly a pleasant space to catch a flight though I doubt I’d like to spend a lengthy delay there.
One airport where I might not mind a flight delay is the Bern Airport in Switzerland. It has a public observation platform next to its box of a terminal that opened 2003. Fliers, families, and anyone who just happens to cycle past — the airport terminal is on Switzerland’s national cycle route 8 — are welcome to stop and watch the planes coming and going, and maybe grab a cuppa at the Bistro Time Out in the terminal.
A cuppa may also be fliers’ best alternative to the industrial chic — if sterile — waiting area.
Charlottesville is one small airport that applies the local architectural vernacular well. The city is home to the University of Virginia, founded and designed by Thomas Jefferson who is known, among other things, for his American take of neo-classical architecture.
“The airport's main doors [open] into a huge rotunda reminiscent of the one designed by the area's patron saint, Thomas Jefferson, for his university,” wrote the Richmond Times-Dispatch when the terminal opened in March 1991.
The newspaper went on to say that the rotunda opens to “panoramic views of the Blue Ridge” mountains to the airport’s west. That view, at least when I visited, was not obvious and may have been lost to the increased security requirements implemented in the years since the terminal opened.
Still, Charlottesville is a coherent and compact terminal that travelers who I spoke with like.
The same cannot be said for every small airport. There are the austere, utilitarian airports that, without ornamentation, get the job done. Like Ísafjördur.
The terminal at the Icelandic airport is a single-story structure that is part corrugated metal hangar, part budget International Style steel-and-glass box. And amenities? A broken coffee machine and a few picked over snacks (at least they were free?).
But where Ísafjördur falls short in design it makes up with views. The terminal is hemmed in by a mountain rising steeply to its south and the waters of the Skutulsfjörður fjord to the north just across the runway. Truly a stunning locale.
And then there are the lucky few small American airports that face the good fortune of needing to accommodate rapid growth. Air service to small airports in the U.S. has trended down over the past few decades and accelerated during the pandemic.
Where airports do need to grow, the result can often be incoherent, rambling structures that are the amalgamation of different attempts to manage growth.
Take, for example, Yampa Valley Regional Airport that serves the popular Colorado outdoor destination, Steamboat Springs. Departing passengers numbers more than doubled to more than 200,000 in 2023 from 96,000 in 2018 — Southwest Airlines added Steamboat to its map in 2020 — U.S. Bureau of Transportation statistics via Cirium Diio shows. And that rapid growth, coupled with a global pandemic in the middle, shows in Yampa’s incoherent departure hall.
The landside facade is a pleasant, if not stand out, contemporary high-desert aesthetic. Stone-covered walls rise to a stuccoed clerestory punctuated by roof supports. The roof is red like Colorado’s soil. And inside, the ticketing lobby is airy with exposed wood beams and skylights.
Where Yampa falls apart is post-security. Gate waiting areas have been added in a haphazard fashion that is neither spacious nor cohesive, and undersized for the mainline aircraft the airport now sees during the peak ski season.
Even the airport commission posed the question “Bigger Terminal Needed?” at a recent meeting (an expansion is underway).
And, let’s be honest, an overcrowded small airport takes away one of their biggest joys — the quick in and out they afford. Something mega-airports like Atlanta can never claim.
Still, even at Yampa, you can stand at the fence and watch planes.