Aspen Fly Right’s Staff, Officers, Directors, and Professional Advisors
Staff
Aspen Fly Right’s four Directors, listed below, include its three founding Officers, who are also its volunteer operating staff. Their work is coordinated by the President, who curates most of the research and writing. Other volunteers provide occasional support. There are no paid staff. A paid consultant, Ignition Strategies Group (Denver), provides professional services for this educational campaign.
Expert sources
Our information sources include confidential direct and indirect discussions with an informal network of unpaid aviation experts including Aspen Airport and Fixed Base Operations (FBO) employees, NetJet pilots, SkyWest management and pilots, Roaring Fork Valley pilots and aircraft owners, several major US airlines’ senior operating personnel, Federal Aviation Administration personnel, Washington DC aviation counsel, international and domestic airport architects, construction designers, and contractors, and aviation consultants with global experience in airport design and redevelopment (including FBO operations, state-of-the-art terminal design, aircraft performance, airport navigation requirements, and other airport and aircraft disciplines). Many of our informants have requested anonymity. We cite our sources if they permit us to. We gratefully acknowledge all informants’ generous cooperation. Responsibility for any reporting errors is ours. We invite all readers to notify us of any errors they find.
Governance
Aspen Fly Right, founded 25 August 2022, is governed by a self-perpetuating Board of Directors, initially comprising three volunteer officers and in December 2022 adding one independent Director. It is anticipated to expand further. In alphabetical order, the four Directors are:
Ellen Anderson, Treasurer
Ellen W. Anderson earned a BA from Brown University, was certified in 1982 as a Colorado Peace Officer, received advanced professional training, and pursued graduate studies in public administration at the University of Colorado (Denver).
Beginning her career in education (including as Assistant Director of Information Services for the College Board), Ellen then served as a Pitkin County Deputy Sheriff for 30 years (with a two-year hiatus 2001-2003). While performing all uniformed-officer duties, she became Airport Liaison, founding director of Aspen’s Tipsy Taxi service, Special Projects Coordinator, Crime Prevention Officer, and Public Information Officer. She represented Pitkin County at many organizations up to national and international levels, and developed the County’s plans for Pre-Disaster Mitigation, Points of Distribution, Emergency Operations, Continuity of Operations, and Courthouse Security.
During 2001–03, Ellen consulted for a private security firm developing successful proposals for the Pitkin, Eagle, and Routt County Airports and the 2003 X Games, was certified as an armed security guard at Aspen Airport, and managed a large Aspen office building. Her most influential work, in a 1995–2002 collaboration with Dr. Marcelline Burns (Southern California Research Institute), was A Colorado Validation Study of the Standardized Field Sobriety Test (SFST) Test Battery (Burns and Anderson), funded by NHTSA and published by the Colorado Department of Transportation. It validated the field sobriety tests with Colorado data to a 0.05% BAC level.
In 2003, the Pitkin County Sheriff and Public Safety Council chose Ellen as the County’s Emergency Management Coordinator. Her duties included harmonizing County-wide emergency services and mutual aid across 27 public safety agencies, extensive public education, suicide-prevention work, and organizing and facilitating Incident Management Teams for seven public health or hazard threats plus special law enforcement incidents.
Since 2011, Ellen has continued to serve the Sheriff’s Department as a Consultant for the Prevention of Impaired Driving. She continues as director of Aspen’s Tipsy Taxi, which she created in 1983—a national model that has given many tens of thousands of people safe rides home so they don’t drive drunk—and to spread its practice pro bono.
Ellen received Basalt Town Council’s Outstanding Community Service Award in 2005 and national recognitions from the Colorado Department of Transportation, National Commission Against Drunk Driving (twice), and Centers for Disease Control. She has served on Aspen City Council, the Aspen Planning and Zoning Commission, the Pitkin County Clean Air Advisory Board and County Election Commission, and more than a dozen other organizations while managing three properties. She has lived in Aspen since 1976.
Michael J. Kinsley, Independent Director
Michael Kinsley is an artist, facilitator, mediator, lecturer, trainer, and author.
As a facilitator, Michael conducts retreats and important meetings with all kinds of organizations to resolve issues (including community-scale matters) through collaboration and whole-system thinking. As a mediator, Michael works with small groups and individuals. (KinsleyDiplomacy.com)
As a painter, Michael has shown all over the Roaring Fork Valley in galleries and community venues, plus several galleries outside the valley. Also, his clients commission paintings of their chosen scenes. In December 2021, he had a successful solo show at The Art Base in Basalt. (KinsleyPaintings.com)
From 1983 to 2016, Michael worked for Rocky Mountain Institute, where he specialized in community and corporate workshop design and facilitation. He had extensive experience with and was a speaker on local sustainability, economic development, collaborative and integrative decision-making, and college climate initiatives. From 1986 to 2009, Michael headed RMI’s communities practice and wrote Economic Renewal Guide, a Collaborative Process for Sustainable Community Development(1997). His work took him to 43 U.S. states and several foreign countries. He worked with several American cities in their efforts to develop green and sustainability plans. In 2008, visits with twelve college campuses were the basis for his second book, Accelerating Campus Climate Initiatives: Breaking Through Barriers.
As a Pitkin County Commissioner from 1975 to 1985, Michael was part of the initial wave of progressive local elected officials that set aside ol’-boy politics and began the era of growth control, affordable housing, public transportation, and environmental protection.
He earned a BS degree in Political Science from the University of Houston.
His recent volunteer work includes Pitkin County Open Space and Trails Trustee (2018–present), Snowmass Capital Creek Caucus Board of Directors (off and on since 1998), Aspen Institute Community Mobility Forum (2017–18), and Clean Energy Economy for the Region Board of Directors (2009–2022).
Michael’s studio/home is in Old Snowmass. He’s lived in the Valley since 1970 and was inducted into the Aspen Hall of Fame in 2013.
Amory B. Lovins, President
Physicist Amory Lovins (1947– ) is Cofounder (1982), former CEO, Chairman Emeritus, former Chief Scientist (2007–19), and Trustee (1982– ) of RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute), where he continues to collaborate. He helped build RMI from scratch to more than 600 staff with offices worldwide, a $150-million annual budget, and a global reputation for rigorous research and effective implementation, largely in collaboration with the private sector. RMI’s mission is to transform the global energy system to secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future for all.
Lovins is sole or lead author of 31 books and over 830 papers; a designer of superefficient buildings, vehicles, and industrial plants; and an advisor (1973– ) to major governments and firms worldwide on advanced energy efficiency and strategy. He received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Zayed, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, 12 honorary doctorates, the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood, National Design, and World Technology Awards, and Germany’s Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit.
A Harvard and Oxford dropout, former Oxford don, honorary US architect, Swedish engineering academician, and 2011–18 member of the US National Petroleum Council, Lovins has taught at ten universities (most recently the Naval Postgraduate School and Stanford University, where he’s currently Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Scholar of the Precourt Institute for Energy). In 2009, Time named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 top global thinkers.
Besides flying many millions of commercial miles and an occasional simulator, military flight, or light-plane right seat, his aviation background includes serving on two Defense Science Board task forces on military energy (mostly aviation), launching an Air Force weight-reducing effort that saved over $10 billion, visiting and lecturing at US and European aeronautical research centers, advising a major airframe-maker on design process and strategy, cofounding and chairing an advanced-composites firm serving aviation customers, leading two RMI studies of aviation efficiency (one Pentagon-cosponsored), and in 2019, keynoting the world sustainable aviation conference for the industry’s Air Transport Action Group, addressing the International Civil Aviation Organization’s similar conference, and consulting for the CEO of one of the world’s largest airports. His insights into superefficient and electrified autos, where he helped launch three startups, support his novel synthesis of parallel revolutionary paths in aviation.
A third-generation Coloradan (with a 40-year gap), Lovins has lived in Old Snowmass since 1982. His wife, fine-art landscape photographer Judy Hill Lovins, arrived in Aspen in 1971.
Susan Taylor, Secretary
Susan Taylor began her professional career in North Carolina designing commercial interiors after earning a BS at the University of Georgia with a concentration in Interior Design and Art. She spent her career as a commercial designer, finding it critically important to develop space and interior environments to support both function and aesthetics. Her decades of experience focused on the importance and implementation of the highest use of space to support people in their professional lives, at their offices—the most time-consuming place for Americans. She’s a firm believer in “form follows function”…then making it aesthetically pleasing.
Ms. Taylor has also been involved in a multi-generational child development facility. The importance of child development and support for the best possible outcome for our future generations—appropriate healthcare, nutrition, education, and environment—cannot be compromised if we are to create a better world for all.
She has spent the past several years traveling extensively, familiarizing her with air travel across the globe and gaining an enhanced sense of airport function, comfort, and efficiency.
Ms. Taylor has lived in Pitkin County full-time since 2006, starting in Aspen. She was involved in the Woody Creek Community Center from its opening to its closing and is currently on the Woody Creek Planning Board.
Professional advisors
Aspen Fly Right is represented in tax and organizational matters by Ken Ransford, Esq., CPA, of Ken Ransford, P.C. in Basalt. Our legal counsel is Moye White in Denver.