A vocal minority has made it appear that Pitkin County is divided on airport modernization. We are not. Our community wants a reliable, safe, modern airport that can accommodate our citizens and visitors. There are two simple premises on which the vast majority of valley residents will agree:
• Our valley needs a safe, reliable airport. Our economy and citizens depend on it. Our economy relies on tourism and needs a quality airport.
• Our current airport is insufficiently safe and reliable. We should prioritize safety: planes with modern avionics, modern navigation on the ground, more reliable commercial planes (the CRJ-700 has too many mechanical issues to count), a stable runway that does not require increasingly expensive annual repair and a known path to retain commercial service whenever the CRJ-700 aircraft ages out of fleets. We should also prioritize reliability to reduce the challenges that we and our visitors experience when traveling to and from ASE.
A tremendous amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt has been leveled at the county’s airport modernization plan. The most notable claim has been that modernization will lead to billionaires flying even larger private planes into Aspen. This argument is simply fear-mongering.
First, massive private planes can fly in today. There are very few billionaires holding off on their private flights to Aspen because they can’t fly their private 737. They just fly their Gulfstreams, which are pretty big already.
Second, there are very few humans on the planet who own one of the 737-scale private jets unable to land at ASE today. Do we really want to build our public policy on preventing the one sheik who will trade up to his 737 instead of flying his Gulfstream? The sheik is coming, either way, if he wants to come to Aspen. The plane is big, either way, when it lands.
The real agenda here seems to be to kill the airport altogether. Opponents know that the FAA will not support Aspen exceptionalism while also offering us the government’s infrastructure funds. Opponents offer two ephemeral promises.
First, they promise that prototype-stage aircraft in development from dubiously capitalized start-ups will magically appear in the fleets of American and United. This is the plan that will future proof our air service from the eventual retirement of the CRJ-700? No one knows when the CRJ-700 will prove too much of a maintenance or economic burden to retain in fleets, but we need to make sure our airport can accommodate a known, validated jet that can substitute whenever the CRJ-700 is gone.
Second, opponents promise that privatizing the fixed-base operator, or FBO, will somehow fill the massive financing hole left without federal government funds. These are speculative hopes with a very wide range of possible outcomes. It’s a cool idea to privatize the FBO, but there are many “if” statements — if we can retain and attract the right talent, if we can run a complex operation when some of our simple government-led real estate development projects go sideways, if the economics work out and the promised profits are realized, if there are no major airport surprises that necessitate funding greater than the FBO can support.
If, if, if. We should not build public policy on hopes and promises of how an uncertain future will evolve. We have real needs and real problems today. We also have a real economy that cannot afford the airport withering away because we bet on speculative claims.
What is not speculative is that we want our kids to be on the safest commercial jets with a runway that is not crumbling. We want modern avionics and navigation systems so the airport can operate more safely and reliably in our valley’s unpredictable weather. We want to welcome visitors who drive our local economy and who also are key to the amazing ski mountains, trails, culture and restaurants we enjoy as locals. We want to take advantage of federal infrastructure funds before they are gone, so our valley’s residents don’t have to fund the airport.
We cannot build our policy around preventing the occasional Boeing business jet instead of a Gulfstream. We must build our policy around the 99% of us who fly commercial, live in an economy that depends meaningfully on visitors, and who want a safe, reliable and modern airport. Aspen is exceptional, but we don’t want to be exceptional as the special and successful mountain town that dies out because we adopt magical thinking as policy-making.
The best path forward is the modernization plan on the table, with funding support from the FAA. Most of us can live with the slight risk of a bigger commercial or private plane landing because we know we need an operating airport: today, five years out and 20 years out. We would prefer to worry less about whether our families will land safely because our runway is crumbling, the avionics on the CRJ-700 are 30 years old, and the airport’s navigation system is outdated.
Please support the modernization plan. Updating the airport is going to be disruptive no matter what, so we are better off having more time to execute the transformation versus running into a crisis that renders our airport inoperable.