A plan to shift the runway at the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport would allow planes with wider wingspans to land. Questions about how many of which kinds of wider-winged planes have emerged as a factor influencing Tuesday’s vote on two ballot questions about the airport’s future. The campaign against the plan to shift the Aspen airport runway and loosen a long-standing wingspan limit warns voters that doing so would invite a hoard of privately operated Boeing 737s and other bigger, older and dirtier aircraft.
Data from other airports in the Western U.S. that serve mountain-resort destinations where such planes can land suggests there is relatively little demand for private Boeing 737s that are currently too big for Aspen, with no more than a handful of privately operated flights per year over the past four years at Eagle-Vail and Rifle airports, and fewer than that at others.
Variants of the Airbus 319 and 320 were not operated privately in the time frame surveyed by Aspen Journalism and covering five airports. (The other three are at Jackson Hole, Sun Valley and Gunnison.) On the other hand, the Gulfstream 650, which is a new-generation long-range private jet that was subject to a 2012 Federal Aviation Administration ruling preventing its operation under current conditions at Aspen-Pitkin County Airport (ASE), is in regular use in these markets, which are visited by other luxury private jets with wings too wide to currently land at the local airstrip.
The campaign asking vo.
