Aspen private air business shows surprising resilience
10/18/2011 —
ASPEN, Colo.—Much like throughout the rest of the country, private air traffic in and out of Aspen has not yet recovered to its pre-recession levels. In fact, operations have decreased in all but three of the last 12 years. Yet three of the main operators flying private clients to and from Sardy Field say their business is up this year, and two of them came into the market in the depths of the economic downturn. A combination of changes in aircraft, customer use patterns, and business models that have adapted to the new reality may explain this discrepancy.
As with nearly every other industry, private air operations have tumbled sharply in recent years. The number of privately owned aircraft flying into and out of Aspen/Pitkin County Airport—including fractionals and charters—totaled barely over 16,000 operations in 2010. That’s an 18.6 percent drop from 2009 operations, and nearly half of the 31,724 private aircraft operations in Aspen in 1999, according to data from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Data through August of this year shows that private air operations in Aspen are trending down 6.1 percent from 2010—a sharper drop than from 2008 to 2009, when they declined 2.2 percent, but better than the 8.7 percent decline from 2007 to 2008. The last years private air traffic rose were 2004 and 2005, when operations went up 2 percent and one-half percent, respectively.
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