Cleveland Hopkins Director Robert Kennedy Announces Retirement
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Robert Kennedy, who navigated Cleveland Hopkins International Airport through the COVID-19 crisis and helped develop a $2 billion plan to rebuild the aging facility, announced his retirement Tuesday.
Airport director Kennedy, 69, said he will stay with the city through a transition process, which could last several months.
Kennedy arrived in Cleveland in early 2017, three years after United Airlines closed its hub at Hopkins. In the years since, the airport has steadily increased passenger traffic and improved its customer service scores with travelers – at least until the coronavirus pandemic brought air travel nationwide to a near stop in early 2020.
His departure comes at a delicate time for the airport, as the facility continues to recover from the pandemic and the airport prepares to begin talks with the airlines about financing a major rebuild of the terminal. “There’s never a good time,” said Kennedy, who came to Cleveland from Atlanta, where he worked as a consultant and an executive at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport. “There’s always something going on.”
Among his accomplishments, he cited the development of a 20-year master plan for the airport, finished last year, which calls for a $2 billion investment in the aging terminal at Cleveland Hopkins. Later this year, the city is scheduled to start negotiations with the airlines that operate at Hopkins about financing the plan.
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“Our facilities are old,” he said. “They have not been the best maintained. They’re not efficient. We have modern aircraft coming into a 1950s-era facility.”
“We’ve got a great city, a great region,” he added. And it deserves a better airport.
He said he would advise the mayor to hire a replacement with experience in large-capital-project financing and program management. “We have a lot to do,” he said. “There is a path to get it done.”
Baiju Shah, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, praised Kennedy for his transparent leadership through the pandemic. “We have emerged in a very strong position, in terms of the number of seats and flights leaving Cleveland on a daily basis,” said Shah.
Any successor needs to be able to manage short-term goals – adding more flights, in particular to business destinations, he said – with longer-term needs, including the execution of terminal improvements. “You have to be able to work it in both timeframes, to continue to push forward the transformation of this airport into a true 21st century airport, while managing the realities of monthly challenges,” he said.
In 2018, Kennedy oversaw the addition — and subtraction — of two new airlines to Cleveland Hopkins offering nonstop flights to Iceland. Neither route lasted a year. He said he expected new nonstop service to Europe from Cleveland in the next year or two.
He also steered the airport through several crises during his tenure, including the disabling of some computer systems at the airport in 2019 during a ransomware attack, and the resolution of a civil penalty lodged against the airport by the FAA for snow-removal issues that occurred under Kennedy’s predecessor.
Kennedy said a trip to California last week to visit his children and grandchildren pushed him to pull the trigger on retirement. “I had such a great time,” he said. “You don’t get this time back.”
Kennedy, hired by former Mayor Frank Jackson, was one of a handful of department leaders that new Mayor Justin Bibb decided to keep on, in a non-interim role.
“We are grateful to Director Kennedy for his steadfast leadership—particularly for seeing our airport system through the many challenges presented by the pandemic,” said Bonnie Teeuwen, chief operating officer for the city. “The city is prepared to conduct a national search for a new airport director. We continue to look for the brightest and best candidates for leadership roles, particularly those that can help transition our city and services to the next level.”
As Cleveland’s director of port control, Kennedy also oversees Burke Lakefront Airport, the small, downtown facility that Bibb’s administration intends to study in an effort to see whether it should remain open. Add that to the to-do list of Kennedy’s successor.
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