The Cincinnati Airport is Actually in Kentucky and It Used to be Awesome

A Melancholy Trip Through a Former Happening Hub

Take yourself back to the year 2004 or so: people are watching American Idol on a TV at its scheduled time, some guy you know with money has a Motorola RAZR, and you can make some sweet flight connections at CVG, more formally known as the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

We know because we were there. Well, we flew through there a lot.

The peak of the Delta Air Lines hub in Cincinnati happened to coincide with the start of our business travel career. For us, all (or most) roads led through CVG, sometimes whether we wanted them to or not.¹

There have been many stories written about what happened to the former Delta Hub, starting with the challenges the airline was facing post 9-11 and then the inevitable reductions that came with the Northwest merger in 2008. There’s no need for us to rehash all that. We’ll just say RIP, Simplifares.²

We hadn’t seen much of CVG since those heady days, but our new home base requires us to fly out of CVG on occasion, and that means we have to confront the physical changes at the airport, and as a result, our own passage through time. Ugh.

Plenty of room on the People Mover — or you can just walk, it’s really not that far.

At its peak in 2005, approximately 60,000 passengers flew through CVG every day. That number is now down to just under 25,000. So, the first thing we always notice is the lack of peeps! In particular, the central Atrium in the B Concourse used to be a buzzing hive of activity with a well-frequented Outback Steakhouse that we may or may not have frequented.³ Enter that same area today, and it’s home to the only Chick-Fil-A in the world without a line. Formerly packed gate areas in Concourse B now sit empty, flanked by the early 2000s-style counters we helped design. Those counters are heavy, expensive, and no longer suitable for today’s customer service technology, but they still stand sentry as a symbol of the former fourth-biggest hub in the world.⁴

The nerd in us loves the Woolly Mammoth fossil on the concourse, but man is that an interesting metaphor.

Looking out to the west from Concourse B, there sits a giant empty concrete pad where the Old Concourse C used to sit. Or, as we used to call it, the Comair Bus Terminal. When the Canadair regional jet burst on the scene in the early 2000s, you could connect through Terminal C from one third-tier city to another.⁵ All the flights were up on a central board, and when your door was announced, you’d go walk to your noble 50-seat chariot on your way to Greenville, Akron/Canton, Madison, or some other exciting destination. Now Comair is gone entirely, 50-seat regional jets are almost gone, and all we have are DHL planes taxiing over the grave.

You’d think they could put an old CRJ out there monument style to remind people of when 50-seaters ruled the world.

Some signs of former glory still remain, like the People Mover with a copycat of the OG Delta livery and one of the country’s most labyrinthine parking garages. And, in a nod to today’s tastes, you can buy bourbon EVERYWHERE at CVG, which, again, is in Kentucky.

Unfortunately, all these physical transformations inevitably affect the people who work at the airport. We had countless wonderful interactions with the team at CVG both as a passenger and a fellow employee — sadly, most of those jobs no longer exist.

To their credit, the leadership at CVG made a successful transition from passenger hub to cargo hub and the airport now sits as the sixth-busiest cargo hub in North America. There’s also the irony that more people fly to and from CVG than ever before; you just no longer have the masses of people flying through.

Still, you literally cannot escape the symbolism of the massive Amazon hub on the other side of the field while the passenger side is a fraction of its former self. In 2004, Amazon was a website you still used to buy books … occasionally … if the Borders was closed.⁶ Amazon can do a lot, but they can’t connect you to Greenville.

Notes

1. Having an airline as a client means you are invariably flying on that airline when working for them and very often connecting if necessary — all part of the gig

2. Memory is foggy, but pretty sure we helped come up with that name or definitely some of the spin for it — it was a noble pre-bankruptcy effort to keep the people of the Queen City from driving to Dayton to fly Southwest back when that would actually save you money

3. Outback rules and the replacement “Bengals Bar and Kitchen” is an abomination — Bloomin’ Onions have won as many Super Bowls as the Bengals

4. Looking back at numbers, even we were surprised that CVG was ranked that high — respect

5. We probably need to do a piece on how that Canadair CRJ-200 went from the most appreciated plane to the most loathed one in such a short time

6. Once saw a note on a shuttered Borders: “We don’t have a bathroom. See if you can buy one on Amazon”