Local and airline officials are eager to weigh in on a proposal to reduce the nighttime hours of the Aspen airport’s air traffic control tower. And while they are being guardedly neutral about potential impacts, they have raised some reliability and service concerns.
“We need to be concerned about it,” said Stay Aspen Snowmass President Bill Tomcich, the local airline liaison, adding that the move could have an impact on tourism. “My concerns relate to the airlines’ concerns. It doesn’t sound alarming, but one definitely of concern because of the snowball of unintended consequence on this one. But we don’t know how serious of an issue it is.”
Since at least January, FAA officials have been studying the possibility of closing the Aspen airport tower at 8 p.m. in the summer and 7 p.m. in the winter, rather than at 10 p.m. year round, as it is done now. A non-staffed tower does not preclude planes’ landing or taking off — in fact, a few flights do come in after the tower closes currently, by communicating with a regional air traffic control center in Longmont and with each other.
The FAA has not notified local airport officials or airlines flying into Aspen of the proposed change, which the FAA’s Seattle district office is now considering (and which must ultimately be approved at D.C. headquarters.)
Thus, many of those interviewed for this article said they need to look into the proposed changes more before formulating an opinion.
Still, landing with tower guidance is preferable, according to airline officials.
“Anything that constricts our ability to fly when and where we want is not ideal,” said Joe Hodas, spokesman for Frontier Airlines, which begins its regional service to Aspen on April 26. “We’d rather fly into an airport that’s fully staffed, so would probably change our schedule” if the change were made.
Frontier has one flight scheduled to land after 8 p.m. once it starts operations.
A spokeswoman for SkyWest, which operates United and Delta flights into and out of Sardy Field, also expressed a preference for using the local air traffic control tower.
“It looks like the impact would be minimal,” said SkyWest spokeswoman Marissa Snow; however, the airline’s main challenge with an unstaffed tower would be weather.
“SkyWest is a safety-first airline and we wouldn’t compromise anything on that front,” she said, adding that if SkyWest received reports of bad weather and the Aspen tower weren’t staffed, it is possible that the airline would cancel flights before they were even routed to Aspen.
A local air traffic controller said that the airport’s automated weather system is not always accurate, and tower staffers often augment the reports it generates with their own observations. For example, local tower staff might measure greater visibility than the weather station indicates. Additionally, they can react to minute-by-minute changes in conditions.
And while there are few late-night flights, those aircraft are especially important: They are also the first flights out of Aspen in the morning — and those early morning flights are extremely popular, said Tomcich. He added that United’s direct flight from Chicago that arrives at 7:45 p.m. serves many international passengers connecting from Europe.
Tomcich said he is not surprised that the FAA has not informed the airlines of the potential change, but “I would hope they’d research all the potential consequences, and at some point they would need to reach out to the air carriers.”
He also reinforced SkyWest’s point that without a fully staffed Aspen tower, the airlines could become more cautious regarding flight cancellations and diversions.
“I’m sure (late night flights) can be operated safely, but there would be more of a service concern, and reliability concerns,” said Tomcich.
Airport manager Jim Elwood, who maintains a close relationship with the FAA but only learned about the studied changes on Wednesday, pointed out that they aren’t a reality yet, and he needs to understand the situation more clearly.
“I certainly wish they’d communicated with us first, but that didn’t happen, so we’ll figure it out from here,” he said. “I look forward to talking to the carriers in more detail. And I expect the conversations to continue for the next several weeks.”
An FAA official said the reduction in hours, if approved, could be implemented as early as this summer.
lutz@aspendailynews.com