Todd Scher grew up on 27th Avenue just a few blocks from the Vero Beach Airport. In fact, his boyhood home was right in line with the now defunct north-south runway and planes roared over his childhood rooftop daily as they climbed or descended, depending on the wind direction.
“It just enthralled me,” Scher recalls. “Living that close, it was easy for me to scoot out there from time to time to see what was going on, and I took an instant interest in all things aviation.”
It never occurred to him as a child that he would run his hometown airport one day, but last week, Scher retired after 30 years at Vero’s sky port, including the last five as airport director.
Brandon Dambeck, who has served as the airport’s operations manager since 2019, will take his place.
Scher began his aviation career in the late 1970s, flying air freight between Vero Beach and Miami, often delivering plane parts to Piper Aircraft, which had set up a research and development center in Vero in 1957 and moved its manufacturing operation to a campus adjoining the airport in 1961.
Scher also flew for U.S. Air Express from 1980 to 1991, piloting flights between Vero Beach, Orlando and Ocala. When that company left town, he went to work as manager of Sun Aviation, a fixed base operator or FBO located at the airport. He also flew charter and corporate passengers while managing the company.
In 1996, he was hired as operations supervisor for Vero Beach Airport. The facility has since been renamed Vero Beach Regional Airport and could one day become Vero Beach International Airport, as it now has a U.S. Customs facility where overseas flights land daily.
“In retrospect, I wish I had made that move to the airport sooner,” Scher says. “Of all the really, really cool things I’ve done, at least in my mind, working for my hometown airport where I had been hanging out since I was a kid has been the most rewarding experience.”
Retiring is bittersweet, he said, but he’s not disappearing from the airport completely. “The plan is for me to be on staff part time, maybe one or two days a week to help deal with the security aspect of the airport,” he said. “But we have an amazing team in place that is going to keep the airport on course. I’m ready to step aside and let them do their thing and watch as the airport continues to grow.”
And boy, is it growing. For a long time that growth was sporadic, Scher said, but when Elite Airways began offering passenger flights to Newark, N.J., in 2015, things got busy fast. Over the next few years, Elite added routes to Asheville, N.C., White Plains, N.Y., and Bangor, Maine, before running into financial difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company suspended Vero Beach operations in July 2022.
“I had my doubts that it would be successful again after that,” Scher said, but Breeze Airways swooped in that same year, taking Elite’s place. The company had planned only four to six flights a week in the first year, but by the fall of 2023 they were offering 18-20 flights a week, Scher said.
“That success caught us off guard, but it also caught them off guard,” he said. Today, Breeze offers 28-32 flights per week in season, flying to and from Islip, N.Y., Newburgh, N.Y., Westchester, N.Y., Hartford, Conn., New Haven, Conn., Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Trenton, N.J., Providence, R.I., and Raleigh/Durham, N.C.
Seeing evidence of a strong market for commercial flights in Breeze’s success, two more major airlines have since set up shop in Vero Beach.
JetBlue began offering nonstop service to Boston and New York last December, and American Airlines started service to Charlotte, NC, in February.
American announced this week that it will add direct flights between Vero Beach and Philadelphia in November.
Dealing with all of these flights “has been a work in progress,” Scher said. “And there is still a learning curve.”
Even in June, considered off-season, more than 29,000 travelers passed through the airport, Scher said.
To deal with all the added traffic, both in the air and on the ground, the airport has expanded passenger holding space inside the terminal and rerouted vehicle traffic in the drop-off and pick-up areas. Canopies now provide shade outside where baggage claim is and there soon will be a covered area outdoors where checked-in passengers can wait to board their flights.
While the footprint of the terminal has not changed, “it is going to make for a more enjoyable experience with more creature comforts,” Scher said of the changes.
The city is building new lots for employee parking and a cellphone waiting area where people can wait in their vehicles to pick up arriving passengers. Construction will soon begin on a 500-vehicle long-term parking lot, which will be operated by Envision Parking Partners. The project is slated for completion in early 2027.
The city’s Planning and Zoning Board has also approved plans for a new car rental facility at the airport.
Scher says he won’t be leaving Vero in retirement. His daughter and grandchildren live nearby, and his son, Joel Scher, 41, manages Sun Aviation, now called the Sun Jet Center. Other than traveling around the state for a bit, he plans to start working on a list of “deferred maintenance” projects at his home.
He’s confident that he’s leaving the airport in good hands, he said.
Like Scher, incoming airport director Brandon Dambeck fell in love with aviation as a boy while hanging around the local airport in his hometown of Sebring. On one of those occasions, a pilot invited him to come closer to see his plane and described how it worked.
He started flight training while still in high school, doing odd jobs to pay for the lessons. After graduating, he enrolled in the Florida Institute of Technology where he earned a bachelor’s degree in aviation management with a minor in aviation safety and got his commercial multi-engine instrument certificate.
Within months of graduating from FIT, Dambeck signed on as a management intern at Vero Beach Airport in 2017.
“I absolutely loved everything that I learned by coming straight to work at the airport,” he said. When the internship ended six months later, he was offered a part-time job as an airline terminal attendant. In 2018 he was promoted to business specialist, responsible for managing leases for the city-owned T-Hangars and Citrus Park Village mobile home park. He was also tasked with researching and applying for grants.
In 2019, he was promoted to Operations Manager, the position he held until last week. In that role, Dambeck continued managing airport leasing and grant administration while taking on the added responsibility of upholding the FAA Code of Regulations Part 139 certificates for the airport. These are a set of operational and safety mandates that all civil airports must follow, from small airports like Vero’s, all the way up to massive international airports like those in Miami and Orlando.
Dambeck’s first major task as Operations Manager was overseeing the 2022 $11 million runway renovation project.
“It’s a fast-changing environment,” he said about working for the airport. “Since we accept federal grants, we are subject to a long list of grant assurances from the FAA. One of those is, essentially, if an air carrier wants to come here and we have the facilities for them to be able to operate, we can’t turn them down.”
When Breeze ramped up operations in 2023, other airlines were watching to see if the new flights would be profitable, Dambeck said. It wasn’t long before Jet Blue and American came knocking.
“You have to remain flexible, expect the unexpected and be ready to respond as needed,” Dambeck said.
The success of all three airlines in Vero Beach “shows just how much of a community asset the airport is,” he said. “People can now connect to anywhere in the world at an affordable rate.”
Dambeck lives in Palm Bay with his wife, Amanda, a therapist, and his 3-year-old daughter, Amelia – named, naturally enough, after the most famous female pilot in aviation’s 120-year history.
