The impact Covid-19 had on the airline industry was unlike anything that Melinda Montgomery, the manager of the Trenton-Mercer Airport, had ever seen before. Having been through other major events like 9-11, she knew that the industry would bounce back.
Her leadership and commitment to keeping passengers and employees safe during the pandemic, combined with her dedication to developing young professionals in the industry are just some of the ways she is turning corners in the niche commercial airport industry.
Recently, the Hamilton resident’s efforts have earned her the respect of her industry peers as she became president of the Northeast Chapter of the American Association of Airport Executives for 2022. Elected during the association’s annual meeting in Vermont in August, Montgomery is only the seventh female president in the chapter’s history, and is one of only 429 commercial airport managers in the country.
“Melinda Montgomery’s expertise is instrumental in the growth and continued success at Trenton-Mercer Airport,” says Mercer County Executive Brian M. Hughes. “Under her leadership, we have expanded services for our airport tenants, including several Fortune 500 members, and added destinations that the public desires.”
Hughes said that in Montgomery’s 20-plus years at the airport, she has always maintained a high level of enthusiasm for the airport. “I believe that the airport and the surrounding area have tremendous value and potential, and Melinda is an important part of the team that advances the strategic redevelopment of that region,” he said.
Her appointment to the national organization comes a year after she was given the 2020 Presidential Award for the Northeast Chapter for her efforts in developing a young professionals group for that chapter, which she considers her passion project.
The group’s goal is to identify those within the industry under 35 years old and develop their leadership skills, provide them with mentorship, and help bring them to the next level of their careers — support that was not available at the start of her career, Montgomery says.
“Basically you just hung around the airport, and you learned how things worked,” she says of her own experience growing her career. “It just seemed to me that it would be more beneficial to have a formalized program to really get these next leaders to a higher level of development. It’s nice to have connections and a network of support, and when you have a problem at your airport, it’s really great to be able to reach out to someone you know at another airport and bounce ideas off of them. To develop those social networks is invaluable.”
She first got the group of young professionals together in person at a conference in 2019 in Maine. Once the pandemic hit, she realized that it would not only be hard for these professionals to continue developing these relationships, but it also generated uncertainty for a lot of them who hadn’t been through a similar event.
“I told them the industry itself is going to recover,” she recalls. “We recovered from wars, we recovered from recessions, we recovered from 9-11. We will recover from this pandemic.”
To further keep her staff safe, she also implemented a number of changes at the airport, including coming up with procedures for how they dispersed vehicles. She eliminated vehicle sharing and then broke her employees into two teams: A and B. “If the A team had a person who became infected, the B team would take over,” she explained.
She also kept her employees out of physical contact with the air control tower, which is a critical element of the airport operations. Inside the terminal, all employees were given social distancing guidelines, among other practices she instituted for passengers and employees.
While these changes were being implemented, Montgomery did not lose sight of her work with the young professionals group, which continued through the pandemic, even though it was virtual. Now 55 members strong, they continued to meet virtually so they could share ideas and network.
Montgomery’s goal is to have these young professionals get more involved in shaping the discussions around the Northeast Chapter’s other committees, including the diversity, conference, and snow committees, which will have even further impact on decision-making in the region’s airports.
Given that the aviation industry is typically dominated by men, Montgomery says it is her personal goal to make sure “every single person has access to opportunities in aviation that goes across gender, race, the unseen and the unheard.”
It’s a legacy she is proud to establish. “What a feeling it is to know that exponentially I am going to have a thumb print on so many of these young people who are going to do great things,” she says.
The transportation industry is not foreign to her family. Her mother was a biller for a trucking company, and her father worked for the Long Island Railroad.
Montgomery has been at the airport for 22 years, but she has been in the industry for 30. Raised on Long Island under the airspace of JFK and LaGuardia airports, she earned her bachelor’s of science in aeronautics at Dowling College in New York before becoming an intern at Philadelphia International Airport.
After her internship, she became an airport planner on Long Island and, for a time, also worked for Delta Airlines at LaGuardia. She moved to San Jose, California, where she worked for five years. During her time in California, she completed her master of business administration in aviation at Embre-Riddle Aeronautical University.
In 2003 she completed her accreditation through the American Association of Airport Executives, which fewer than 10 percent of all airport managers in the country have achieved. The program culminated with writing a thesis paper and then appearing before a board of three people for about five hours, being quizzed about airport management.
While intimidating, the process ensures professionals who earn the accreditation are ready for the challenges that come with the job.
“When you are an airport manager, you are a leader in your community,” she says. “I’m the airport manager 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. You’ve got to conduct yourself in such a way that you make your community and your airport proud, and the process tries to rattle you a little bit to make sure that you are.”
She found her way to New Jersey in 1999, moving to Hamilton. During her tenure at the Trenton-Mercer Airport, she oversaw the process that brought Frontier Airlines into operation at the airport (they will celebrate their 10-year anniversary at the airport in 2022). In 2019, the airport also celebrated its 90th anniversary.
In addition to her passion for developing young professionals, Montgomery is also quite passionate about ensuring the economic viability of the airport.
“It’s an economic powerhouse,” she says. “It’s a fascinating 1,345 acres of economic development, because if you look at a map, it is mostly green space, it’s mostly open space.”
Now that travel is coming back — albeit with changes to how airports are managed — and with a potential new airport terminal on the way in Trenton, Montgomery has her eyes set on economic sustainability. That vision goes hand in hand with the modern — and sanitary — experience she hopes to deliver for travelers.
The pandemic has prioritized sanitation in many aspects of the travel experience. Before, airlines and airports wanted to keep janitorial services in the background, out of the eye of the public. Cleaning crews would clean before passengers arrived on board.
“Now, it’s very much about showing your procedures and how you are sanitizing the facilities,” Montgomery says. “You want to show your cleanliness.”
Montgomery specifically points to the touchless experience as the way of the future. “It irritates me when I go into the bathroom and the water is touchless, but you have to pump a handle for paper towels,” she says. “We are looking at implementing a completely touchless experience.”
That includes also providing facial recognition technology so that passengers do not have to hand over their identification documents, which reduces the physical interaction between both the passengers and the employees. She also hopes to implement a new interface for checked baggage drop-off.
The airport’s current facility lacks a lot of these amenities, which is one of the reasons Montgomery is hopeful for the advancement of the new terminal facility project, which would expand the terminal facility to a total of about 125,000 feet. The project is currently undergoing an environmental assessment by the Federal Aviation Administration.
“The current facility lacks the space requirements to perform these improvements,” she says. “The bathrooms are small, the entire terminal is small.”
The possibility of developing the facility at the same time the industry is undergoing these changes is exciting, and doing so while maintaining a local, small airport flair (complete with drinks from local breweries), is even more enticing, she says.
“If we can just get the people of the region to the popular places they want to go with less trouble and more smiles, it will be perfect,” she says. “We are not Philly, we are not Newark. They are great airports for what they do, but what we have is convenient and nice.”
Trenton Mercer Airport (TTN), 1100 Terminal Circle Drive, Ewing 08628. 609-882-1601. Melinda Montgomery, manager. www.mercercounty.org/departments/transportation-and-infrastructure/trenton-mercer-airport
Trenton-Mercer Airport manager Melinda Montgomery on the tarmac.,
