The Optimist: Amory Lovins and the county agree! (On almost everything)

Being optimistic means seeking opportunities for alignment. Once you get through emotion on an issue, it’s typical to find more points of agreement than disagreement. I had not planned to write again about the airport so soon, but the debate continues with vigor. It seemed worthwhile to highlight the areas of agreement and disagreement, focusing on where our community is more aligned than opposed.

To understand how far apart the two sides are on the airport debate, I re-read the letters and columns Amory Lovins has written and discovered a great deal of alignment. It turns out that Amory and Pitkin County agree that there is no threat from larger commercial planes. He and the county also agree that pillow counts in our lodging sector drive tourism growth, not the airport.

The primary disagreement is over the costs and risks our community should assume in an effort to prevent larger private planes from landing. Amory quantifies how many larger private planes might land in the future, presenting the opportunity for everyone to assess this potential risk.

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I have quoted Amory’s writings at the beginning of each section of this column and noted the date and source publication:

Amory and the county agree that there is no risk of larger commercial planes — the airlines do not want them. Amory’s concern is exclusively about preventing larger private jets.

April 7, Aspen Daily News: “Aspen’s three airlines haven’t asked for bigger planes. They’re happy with the safe, reliable, profitable planes they fly now and, if they wish, for decades more … And since the commercial airlines don’t want bigger planes, our FAA-certified-safe airfield would really be expanded only to fit bigger private jets that don’t serve the needs of the whole community.”

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July 19, ADN: “Downgrading also would prohibit the bigger airline planes that the FAA wants but the airlines don’t. The commercial carriers prefer the rugged, agile, right-sized planes they have.”

Aug 4, ADN: “(Nathan) says “commercial 737s” can’t fly to ASE — yet no one proposes them: the concern is private 737s.”

Amory clearly communicates that the airlines are not interested in flying large commercial jets into Aspen. His consistent focus is stopping bigger private jets. The county agrees with him on the direction of commercial service — for many reasons, regional jets like the Embraer-175 have the characteristics that work for Aspen’s geography and market.

The county also seeks to future-proof the airport to accommodate the Airbus 220 in the event that the E-175 one day goes out of service. Amory is comfortable with a narrower layout that could not accommodate known successors to the E-175. He also accepts the risk of downgrade that would prevent even the E-175 from landing. Addressing the risk of a narrower layout, he presents examples of small, electric air taxis currently in prototype phase. He hopes that these air taxi start-ups will survive and that their tech will prove out, one day scaling up in size to become economically viable.

While almost every elected leader supports the modernization plan, Aspen’s mayor and many Daily News columnists have told the community to fight the county to prevent “industrial tourism.” But Amory, as the intellectual leader of the effort, debunks the risk of industrial tourism from larger commercial planes. He consistently finds no airline wants to use them. He and the county agree that the E-175 will serve the airport for a long time after the CRJ. Aspen’s mayor and others can review Amory’s work in this area.

Amory and the county agree that pillow counts drive passenger growth, not the airport.

July 12, 2023, ADN: “Proof: Pillow counts statistically explain 98% of passenger growth and satisfies every logical test of causality … The forecasters assume no lodging constraints. They call this ‘conservative’ because it ensures adequate airport capacity if 24,600 more pillows get added every three years for the next 20. I call it ‘grossly exaggerated,’ driving needless airport expansion to bring in nearly 100,000 imaginary visitors who’ll sleep on imaginary pillows. A realistic forecast of actual needs would recognize the lodging constraints rooted in our topography and a half-century of growth management.”

Amory and the county agree that pillow count drives tourism growth. In the excerpt above, he objects to the forecast method for passenger growth. He ran a statistical analysis and determined that pillow count meets “every logical test of causality” in explaining passenger growth. He also highlights our area’s physical and growth management limits on lodging growth.

He has the opportunity to educate Aspen’s mayor and the Daily News columnists that his statistical analysis proves pillow count explains 98% of passenger growth and that the airport is not the driver.

Amory quantifies the number of larger private jets that might land in the future. While the county did not reproduce this analysis, the disagreement is over the risks the county should be willing to take to prevent the larger private jet risk.

July 19, ADN: “Allowing bigger planes would let in 485 extra business jets of four new types in 2042 — 1.4% more — and for this we’d spend a third of a billion public dollars?”

By Amory’s accounting, two decades from now, 485 larger business jets will fly into Aspen under the county’s modernization plan. This figure compares to 50,587 private aviation operations in 2042 based on the same county report. If each of these 485 planes represents two flight operations, the objective of his plan would be to stop about 1,000 of the 50,000 private flight operations in 2042. Adding commercial flight operations, his analysis demonstrates that the shift from smaller to larger private planes might contribute under 1% of total flight operations in two decades.

The county takes the view that failing to modernize the airport with an FAA-approved layout presents greater risks and misses greater opportunity to future-proof our community. The county more heavily values the opportunity to use federal money, paid already by taxpayers, to fund airport improvements that will last for the next fifty years. The county concludes that operating without an FAA-approved layout and relying solely on revenue from the FBO are risks of greater proximity and magnitude.

Overall, the areas of agreement far outweigh the areas of disagreement. Our community will experience significant dissension this fall on an issue where the primary disagreement comes down to a possible 1% increase in larger private planes in 2042.

Greg Goldfarb lives in Aspen.