Leadership
The four Aspen Fly Right Directors are also the
organization’s unpaid operating staff.
Amory Lovins
President
Amory is a physicist and former Oxford don who cofounded RMI in 1982 as Rocky Mountain Institute and continues to help it speed global energy transformation. Author of 32 books and 900 papers, he teaches Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He has won many of the world’s top energy and environmental awards, holds 12 honorary doctorates, has advised major firms and governments worldwide for a half-century, and is ranked by Stanford’s citation analysis in the top 2% of the world’s scientists. A third-generation Coloradan, he’s lived in Old Snowmass since 1982.
Susan Taylor
Secretary & Treasurer
A full-time resident of Woody Creek since 2006, Susan serves on that neighborhood’s Planning Commission. She began her professional career in North Carolina, designing commercial interiors after earning a BS with a concentration in Interior Design and Art at the University of Georgia. For decades she developed environments to support function and aesthetics, seeking the highest use of space to support people in their professional lives. She believes “form follows function”—make it work first. She was also involved in a multi-generational child development facility. Extensive global travel has made her familiar with air travel and with airport function, comfort, and efficiency.
Jackie Merrill
Independent Director
Jackie graduated from Smith College and earned a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the Keller School of Management. She has lived in West Buttermilk for 35 years and founded CenterPoint in Aspen, Inc., offering leadership retreats for women and couples for 25 years. She has worked with several nonprofit organizations and served for about 12 years as Board Chair of Spellbinders, an organization that fosters intergenerational connection. Jackie served on the Vision Committee of the 2020–21 ASE Vision process and helped formulate its Common Ground Recommendations.
Dr. Kate Spencer
Independent Director
Kate has lived in Aspen since 2016, when she co-founded Ajax Physical Therapy with her husband, and now has two daughters. She graduated with a Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Northeastern University, where she also served as an online lecturer from 2015 through 2020. Kate is very active in her communities, serving as volunteer physical therapist, programming chair for the American Physical Therapy Association Private Practice (the nation’s biggest PT conference), President of the Aspen Village Homeowners Association, and member of the ASE Vision Focus Group.
Directors Lovins, Merrill, and Spencer all separately applied for membership of Pitkin County’s Airport Advisory Board, but were not accepted.
Expert Sources
Information sources used by Aspen Fly Right include insights provided by an informal network of unpaid aviation experts comprising 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, terminal design, aircraft performance, airport navigation requirements, and other airport and aircraft disciplines). Many of our sources have requested anonymity. We cite our sources if they permit us to. We gratefully acknowledge the generous contribution of each of them.
Professional Advisors
Aspen Fly Right is represented in tax and organizational matters by Ken Ransford, Esq., CPA, of KenRansford, P.C. in Basalt. Our General Counsel is Moye White LLP in Denver. Our specialist counsel is Recht Kornfeld P.C. in Denver.