FlightOps Safety Task Force submits first budget, approves wind study
$50,000 budget must now be approved by the Pitkin County Board of Commissioners.
Austin Colbert/The Aspen Times
The Aspen/Pitkin County FlightOps Safety Task Force announced it submitted its first budget during its Thursday meeting.
Aspen/Pitkin County Airport Project Coordinator Karah Brubaker submitted the $50,000 budget to the Pitkin County Board of Commissioners. The commissioners must now approve the budget.
“The safety task force hasn’t had a budget so far. I thought it was important to get something going,” Brubaker, who has been the airport project coordinator since June of this year, said.
This was her first meeting with the FlightOps Safety Task Force, and her intention is to obtain some seed money, so the task force can move forward with future projects.
Wind study
The task force also unanimously approved a wind study to be conducted at the airport.
Brubaker and a couple of others on the task force have been in talks with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) regarding the wind study.
Initially talking to the center 18 months ago, talks regarding weather and terrain resumed at the beginning of this year. The center shared systems that have been implemented in Juneau, Alaska, to help with turbulence that affects commercial traffic and is causing increasing injuries.
Based on the Alaska case study, the center came up with a proposal to understand how weather is affecting Aspen and how wind events create risks for flights.
“For example, the Hawker incident being one of the most recent incidents where it’s hypothesized that they had vertical wind shear at the other end of the runway,” said Tyson Weihs, task force member. “One of the theories was there was an extreme vertical wind shear event that prevented them from actually becoming airborne.”
The wind study will be composed of three parts, with an optional fourth part.
The study is meant to better understand what is happening in Aspen using technology, like wind sensors. The sensors will record wind information over a period of time beginning this winter.
An operational solutions investigation will also be conducted. This investigation will focus on places like Juneau or Denver, where studies have already been conducted and solutions implemented.
“This will provide recommendations on improvements that can be made at Aspen from both a sensing and a reporting perspective,” Weihs said.
The study will cost $100,000, and the sensor installation will cost $25,000, for a total of $125,000. He proposed to allocate funds from the airport’s operating budget, similar to what was done for the environmental and noise studies.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research, a government agency that supports aviation, is the only group that performs this kind of work, he said. He believes this is the right group to do it, as it has done other studies like this before at other airports, both domestically and abroad.
FlightOps Safety Task Force Chair Barry Vaughn also updated the group on the November ballot question, spearheaded by Our Airport Our Vote, that will amend Pitkin County’s governing document, the Home Rule Charter, as well as require a public vote on the airport runway.
Regan Mertz can be reached at 970-429-9153 or rmertz@aspentimes.com.
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