Quick Takes
This new section responds to specific and recently published “birdshot” criticisms. Bigger, broader, underlying issues are addressed in the “Fact Checks” section and in Essay #15. We hope these short responses will help you understand attacks and queries published in our local newspapers. Please revisit this site periodically to keep up with the debate.
Correction: did the FAA threaten to downgrade our airport?
CRITIC: TOPIC
DATE
24 June 2024
SOURCE
The first sentence of this feature story by a normally accurate reporter mistakenly refers to “a recent email from the Federal Aviation Administration that warns of a probable downgrade for the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport’s classification in Airport Design Group III to ADG II if certain projects aren’t completed.” That email, sent 24 May 2024 from the FAA’s John Bauer to County Manager Jon Peacock at Peacock’s request, nowhere mentions airport downgrade, and the FAA has dismissed that bizarre concept. As far as we know, no such FAA downgrade threat exists, and the FAA has never downgraded an airport and has no requirement, rule, or procedure to do so. The scary downgrade concept was instead developed by consultant Ricondo Associates in a secret report to the County, whose Manager implied that it described an FAA threat. We confirmed that no such threat was made, and rebutted downgrade and the Ricondo report. We also requested a prompt ADN correction. Lacking one, we note these events for the record.
RESPONSE
Dennis O’Meara: United Airlines’ Aspen profitability
CRITIC: TOPIC
14 April 2024
DATE
SOURCE
O’Meara contests our use of the Airport Director’s 2018 remark that ASE was United's third most profitable global airport (ADN 19 Aug 2018). Airlines measure profitability in profits per passenger-mile. O’Meara instead calculates gross revenues per year. Bigger markets do fly more people and get more revenue, but ASE, especially ASE-DEN, tops US profits per passenger-mile—a very lucrative and desirable route for United. We stand by our data. (O’Meara also implies we claimed that the E175 aircraft is superefficient. We didn’t. He misread.)
RESPONSE
Dennis O’Meara: United Airlines’ Aspen profitability
CRITIC: TOPIC
25 July 2024
DATE
SOURCE
O’Meara repeats his 14 April calculation to object to our mentioning again the same 2018 ranking of ASE as UA’s third most profitable station worldwide. Here we simplified the profitability metric as “profit-intensive” to emphasize that it’s not simply total dollars of profit but has a denominator—”per passenger-mile.” He still omits the denominator, confuses revenues with profits, and thus computes an irrelevant number.
RESPONSE
Dennis O’Meara: noise
CRITIC: TOPIC
DATE
21 July
2024
SOURCE
O’Meara touts the County’s new airfield layout plan to fit modestly quieter but bigger new commercial airliners (Essay #9). With that change, ASE commercial airliners’ noise is indeed forecasted to drop slightly after 2030 (Essay #15, p. 6), though widely missing the community’s 30%-quieter goal. But since 2019, ASE has reported no high noise event from commercial airlin-ers. O’Meara ignores private planes—nearly all the noise complaints and 83% of ASE’s flights—to which the new layout would add “bigger, louder,” dirtier old types like private 737s and A319/320s. O’Meara also claims newer planes “equate to less noise,” yet the E175 is newer but noisier. It doesn’t use the engine he cites. And aircraft noise depends on many design factors besides engines. Five errors.
RESPONSE
Nathan Bachamp: airline 737s, weight, E175, finance, privatization, loss of service
CRITIC: TOPIC
17, 18 July
2024
DATE
SOURCE
Bachamp says “commercial 737s” can’t fly to ASE—yet no one proposes them: the concern is private 737s. Those tend to weigh less than airline models, of which he assumes the next-to-heaviest of nine types. He implies E175s would need a new airfield layout (they don’t) but the intended Airbus A220s wouldn’t fit it (they would). He claims the E175 will take years to approve for ASE, ignoring operators’ option to restrict weight on hot days; indeed, United just announced it’ll start phasing E175s into its ASE service in December 2024. Bachamp thinks airport improvements require FAA grants or local taxes, but the offered 20-fold increase in FBO minimum revenues would suffice. He criticizes “privatizing” the airport—an arcane FAA term requiring no private owner—but no one suggests selling our publicly owned airport to a private owner, and we can only guess that perhaps Bachamp thinks “privatizing” means serving only private planes. He fears loss of commercial air service—an outlandishly unlikely outcome, as we noted 19 July. Yes, Mr. Bachamp, please do “Stop the dumb lies and misinformation."
RESPONSE
Eric Simon:
information
CRITIC: TOPIC
DATE
16 July
2024
SOURCE
Simon decries “uneducated opinions.” He might find remedies in two years' carefully documented independent research at aspenflyright.org.
RESPONSE
Evan Marks:
loss of service,
airport finance
CRITIC: TOPIC
DATE
12 April
2024
SOURCE
Marks’s op-ed was rebutted in ours of 1 May 2024. He conjures a closed or federalized airport, a “misguided referendum calling for ASE’s self-man-agement,” sketchy amateur operators, and a panicked exit by spooked airlines. None of this is true. Neither were his criticisms of our financial analysis. Had he read it, he’d know that the new FBO revenues aren’t just “indispensable to financing” the new terminal but can entirely finance it and the new runway and more, without the FAA grants for which he wants to mortgage our community’s quality of life. And those FBO revenues come from private operators who run 83% of the flights but (he estimates) carry 1% of ASE passengers. Private operators, not airlines, want bigger planes. They account for most of ASE’s fuel purchases and runway wear, nearly all noise complaints, all the past five years’ high noise events, and all fatal accidents, so that seems fair.
RESPONSE
Greg Goldfarb:
E175, FBO revenues, old grants, G650s
CRITIC: TOPIC
15 July
2024
DATE
SOURCE
Goldfarb says keeping our airfield’s layout would bar the next regional jet (E175), but he doesn’t mention that that’s only because on 24 May 2024, the FAA illogically threatened to renege on its offer to the BOCC by rescinding the agreement that’s worked well for the past quarter-century and doesn’t need changing. Goldfarb claims that relying on FBO revenues (as the County’s plan does too) would trap us forever in more private-jet travel; no, those new revenues are a guaranteed minimum regardless of flights. He claims the FAA may claw back old grants; the FAA dismissed that idea. He even says an “unsubstantiated" number (33 local G650 owners) was ours; We’d cited it to Airport Director John Kinney in The Aspen Times, 13 Sep. 2015. Goldfarb also published a longer defense of airport expansion for bigger planes on 24 April 2024 (ADN); we responded 19 May.
RESPONSE
Lovins/County agreement?
CRITIC: TOPIC
16 August
2024
DATE
SOURCE
Greg Goldfarb is right that there are areas of agreement, mainly about the need for a modern airport. But views diverge sharply on whether that includes bigger planes, opposed by the three real citizen groups but favored by the two new groups of current or former officials posing as citizens. The two latter groups never mention bigger planes, especially the biggest (the doubled-size A220-300) that drives airfield redesign. Goldfarb is sure bigger planes won’t come (a view he falsely claims we share); so why build it? He dismisses as trivial the four specific new types of bigger business jets that could add 485 more planes per year (the only specific access benefit claimed for the $0.3-billion expansion). But he ignores other categories 13 times larger, bringing in anywhere from over 100,000 extra people in 2042 to two or three times that many. (The FAA’s own 2050 forecast envisages a half-million airline passengers, then more.) Enabling such potential runaway growth, even if not assured, needlessly risks our community’s quality of life.
RESPONSE
Evan Marks:
airport finance
CRITIC: TOPIC
DATE
28 April
2024
SOURCE
On 21 March 2024, Aspen Fly Right published a gamechanging financial analysis, summarized in ADN (21 March) and AT (24 March). It showed from County data that a modern Aspen Airport doesn’t need FAA discretionary grants, and they’re worth little because they impose comparably large expenditures. (The original layout’s extra costs would even exceed the grants. We updated our analysis 8 April 2024 to reflect the latest data and the new layout; the grants remained of modest net value.) The County Manager had our analysis anonymously reviewed. We welcomed this, but replied that the five errors they found were actually their errors, not ours. Meanwhile, investor Evan Marks published a different set of criticisms on 28 April. For more than a month, The Aspen Times chose not to publish a short version of our surprising 12 May rebuttal, nor to respond to requests to meet. We therefore restored details, added Colorado Open Records Act disclosures, and posted it on 10 July. Our financial analysis stands un-scathed. The BOCC continues to ignore it and to hasten to try to qualify for FAA grants that are neither needed nor valuable, all to fit bigger planes.
RESPONSE
Jacqueline Francis: CABP, FBO
CRITIC: TOPIC
10 July
2024
DATE
SOURCE
Jacque Francis in her personal capacity (she also chairs the BOCC’s Airport Advisory Board) claimed Citizens Against Bigger Planes’ leadership “parachuted into town a few months ago.” Its leader Chuck Butler (AT, 15 July 2024) replied that he’s lived upvalley since 2005, “[t]wo other mem-bers were born and raised here, and every one of our core group has been in the valley since at least 2009.” The Aspen Times did not publish our 11 July letter correcting Francis’s additional four misrepresentations about Aspen Fly Right. She wrote: “Many don’t realize that [Aspen Fly Right was]…wrong on the… FBO…issue and once the numbers were made public they did a 180-degree turn—supporting Atlantic running the FBO.” In fact, (1) Aspen Fly Right’s analysis of FBO options remains solid, valid, unrebutted, and ignored. The County could renew Atlantic’s 30-year monopoly, hire a private operator under County policy direction, add a competing second FBO, or run the FBO itself. What’s best? Hard to tell: the County’s FBO deliberations and analyses are secret. We hear the first option will soon be announced. (2) We asked Jacque what “numbers were made public” and where. We’ve seen only advocates’ vague, opaque, cherrypicking claims without underlying analysis. (3) Aspen Fly Right’s view hasn’t changed: unregulated private monopoly returns less public benefit than public control and/or competition, and that’s suboptimal use of a public asset. (4) Aspen Fly Right therefore does not “support” Atlantic’s running the FBO, but only assumed it in our financial analysis to match County assumptions.
RESPONSE
Alan Brookes:
electric-plane wingspans
CRITIC: TOPIC
22 July
2024
DATE
SOURCE
Brookes usefully asks if an electric plane wouldn’t need a wingspan above ASE’s current 95-foot limit. The answer: maybe until 2019, not since. In 2020, a “superlaminar,” lightweight, octupled-efficiency, 6-passenger air taxi with 52-foot wingspan and Aspen-to-London range was revealed after three years of flight-testing. Its electric and hydrogen variants (Essay #5) can scale at least to regional-jet and probably to 737 size but still fit our current airfield—e.g. dozens of seats with a ~70-foot wingspan. Frequent statements that more-efficient planes must have longer wings (e.g. in three Coalition FAQs on 31 July 2024) reflect pre-2020 aeronautical understand-ing. Superlaminar design, with half or less of normal air drag, is now a proven alternative to longer wings. We revised our materials and notified the BOCC immediately on learning this in August 2020, but expansion advocates ignore that new evidence and keep citing our earlier (2019) view. Our latest semitechnical update on “Fossil-Free Flight” reviews principles and progress to May 2024. Some County Staff continue to ensure that this information doesn’t reach the AAB and BOCC while unsound contrary information does, so elected officials cannot properly consider the aviation revolution now underway.
RESPONSE
Jack Cohen: don’t kill the airport
CRITIC: TOPIC
28 July
2024
DATE
SOURCE
Cohen wants “future safety, sustainability and democracy of access” for “economic vibrancy.” We have all that now without bigger planes or moved FAA goalposts. Cohen, a pilot, is right that no one knows what aircraft will be flying in 50 years, but they’ll clearly be vastly cleaner, quieter, and more competitive than the 2016 Airbuses that the County and FAA want us to build for. But 50-year basic design choices can safely wait for that aviation fog to clear, especially since United plans to switch during 2024–26 to brend-new E175 regional jets, and even before that announcement, the supposedly vital and urgent FAA grants weren't needed or worthwhile. The airlines won't “stop coming” to one of their most lucrative airports (see O’Meara, 14 April 2024). Continuing the arrangements that have kept Aspen's airport safe and its economy flourishing for a quarter-century, without adding bigger planes that the airlines aren’t asking for, won't “kill the airport” but can help protect our community’s quality of life. Were Cohen’s unmentioned career not in commercial real estate, he might understand this better.
RESPONSE
Jack Cohen: looking forward
CRITIC: TOPIC
1 August
2024
DATE
SOURCE
Cohen’s goal—ensuring “safe, reliable and cleaner commercial service for the next 50 years”—is Aspen Fly Right’s goal too. Our airport already does those things. We don’t need bigger planes to make the runway sound and the terminal far better. Aspen Fly Right keeps trying to inform the County and its advisors about the strategic future context—new technologies that will transform aviation in the 2030s, with more electric than fueled planes now on order worldwide—but some Staff deny and block this information, and their plan ignores any technologies newer than 2016. When their forecast ends in 2042, their planes will be as outdated as a 1998 car now. The County is driving by looking in the rear-view mirror. Aspen Fly Right informs a clear forward view.
RESPONSE
Correction
CRITIC: TOPIC
2 August
2024
DATE
SOURCE
This broadly accurate story about United Airlines’ important announcement of its planned 2024–26 switch to E-175 regional jets for its Aspen services contains one significant error—calling the impending shift away from 19 CRJ-700s a “retirement." “Retirement” means a plane stops flying because it’s too old to run safely, reliably, and profitably. That’s far from true of United’s Aspen CRJ-700 fleet—one of the world’s youngest, built in 2010. As the article explains, United’s pilot contracts require a CRJ-700 to leave its ASE-serving fleet for every E-175 added, and owner/operator SkyWest is scheduling these transfers to match contract expirations and debt payoffs. Far from retiring, the displaced CRJ-700s will be eagerly welcomed on other routes. Some might instead be converted to upmarket 50-seat versions (CRJ-550) if that’s more profitable, as SkyWest just did for one older CRJ-700 just transferred from its American to its Delta fleet. But either way, these rugged planes wil long continue their profitable service in a new career—not in retirement or scavenged for spare parts. The planned shift to brand-new E-175s renders moot any concerns (inconsistent with evidence) about the CRJ-700s’ operating lives, and demolishes the other key foundation of the 12-year push for bigger planes—that there’s no regional-jet alternative to serve ASE and fit the current airfield. Will that policy be reexamined?
RESPONSE
Ian Long: runway width
CRITIC: TOPIC
2 August
2024
DATE
SOURCE
There’s much to agree with in this letter, but Long confuses three things: the need to fix the runway (with one segment about at the end of its useful life), the FAA’s desire to separate it from the taxiway by 400’ rather than the 320’ allowed since 1999 (so as to fit our 95-foot wingspan limit with equal safety), and the FAA’s desire to widen the runway from 100’ to 150’ to fit its desired doubled-capacity and more-than-doubled-weight A220-300 Critical Design Aircraft. That plane isn’t certified to fly to Aspen, and the County’s lead forecaster personally opines it never will. But its 115-foot wingspan wouldn’t let it land in Aspen without increasing the separation to 400’, and then without its 156,000-pound weight, the runway could keep the 100’ width allowed for planes up to 150,000 pounds. The basic issue here is the 400’ separation that from day one would let in bigger planes: not just the Airbus A-220 family (which the airlines aren’t asking for) but also numerous older, dirtier, noisier private planes like 737s and A319/320s. The vital tasks of fixing the outmoded terminal and decripit runway don’t need to add bigger planes too. The FAA would like that, but it's supposed to respect local laws and rules, the claimed benefits are tiny, and the risks and costs are troubling.
RESPONSE
David Foster: an airport worker’s perspective
CRITIC: TOPIC
3 August
2024
DATE
SOURCE
Seven errors: (1) The CRJ-700s’ 20–30+-y further life documented in Essay 4 was confirmed by its provider (forecast, p 56 n 6) and by the County’s lead forecaster. But (2) United’s announcement of its two-year ASE shift to E175s, starting in December 2024, moots lifeitme concerns by confirming that our dominant carrier plans a brand-new ASE regional jet fleet good for decades more, with better comfort and the latest avionics, and fitting the current airfield. (3) Income from the FBO does not and cannot fund general County services; it’s illegal to take that money off the airport. (4) Electric or efficient planes haven’t needed wider wingspans since a different solution was demonstrated in 2020 (Essay #5), and (5) wider wingspans wouldn’t need a wider runway anyway; Foster confuses width with separation. (6) Aspen Fly Right offered promising noise-reducing policies (Essays #9, #12) and (7) suggested open comparison of four FBO models, one of which was running the FBO itself, as 1,562 US public airports (three-fourths run by counties or cities) did in 2019; its preferred option was hiring a capable private operator under County policy direction.
RESPONSE
Bili Kaye: “just the facts,"
CRITIC: TOPIC
3 August
2024
DATE
SOURCE
Kaye’s view that Aspen won’t see more airline passengers contradicts the official forecast of 31% more airline passengers, 8% more airline flights, and 25% more total flights in 2042 than in 2022. The 2050 FAA forecast calls for three-fourths more airline passengers in 2050 than in 2023. If you don’t believe “build it and they will come,” why build it? Kaye’s bad maintenance experience with one airplane on one night doesn’t mean United’s fleet is “in serious disrepair”: Bill Tomcich’s statistics show ASE’s June airline flight completion percentage (entirely by CRJ-700s) was 96.4% in 2023, 92.5% in 2024 with the runway-fire closure, and would have been 98.9% without it. Aspen Fly Right’s financial analysis didn’t propose shifting airport operating costs to FBO fees, but rather, continuing to meet those costs with all users’ fees as now, and financing construction of the needed better airport (new runway, new doubled-size terminal, etc) by bonds supported by guaranteed new income from the FBO operator. If something is wrong with that analysis, neither the County nor Evan Marks could find it.
RESPONSE
Bill Tomcich: E-175s “are just right for ASE"
CRITIC: TOPIC
8 and 9 August
2024
DATE
SOURCE
The pro-airport but anti-expansion majority ot citizens, wanting a better not bigger airport, will find this inversion of history Orwellian. For three decades, ASE expansionists have sought bigger planes, like the 737s rejected 3:2 by Pitkin County voters in 1995. For 13 years, our County Manager has been corralling the BOCC into expanding the airifield for mainline planes like Airbus A220s, because supposedly the regional-jet CRJ700 fleet was about to retire and no similar alternative was available. Both assumptions proved wrong (and the first moot). United’s CRJ700s will keep flying for decades (elsewhere, as required by pilot contracts) as they’re displaced over two years, starting this December, by new E175s that ASE Vision was wrongly told weren’t a practical option. Thus current plus brand-new regional jets now provide not zero but two assurances of robust airline service for decades, and both those regional jets fit today's airfield. There’s no safety, economic, or other rationale for any bigger planes, nor any environmental reason as far cleaner and more competitive electric planes without wider wingspans take over. Now that United’s switch to E175s, starting December 2024, has destroyed the case for a new airfield to fit bigger planes, Tomcich brazenly claims bigger planes were never the reason, and he can’t recall any ASE Vision participant who thought they were. He should review the Report of the Technical Working Group on which he served (including its last two pages, from Rick Heede) and his own presentation of it. Both focused on bigger planes.