Originally Posted by
20driver
I live in Snomass CO and frequent Aspen airport. Aspen is going through a lot of angst about upgrading the airport to a full design group III. Right now there is a limit on runway/taxiway separation. Currently the commercial service is on RJ700 models flown by Skywest code shares. Skywest is shifting their fleet to the EMB 175 series. .
There is lot of angst about going "green" here. I have looked up numbers for the 737-Max8 which uses about half the fuel and is quieter and produces half the CO2 of an RJ
The EMB 175 seems to limited for operations here and overall does not seem a great performer.
The other alternate mentioned is the A220 but right now that is pretty much Delta - which is operating the planes on mainline contracts.
What I want to establish is which of the recent 737 or A319/320 models could operate here. It seems the worse case is the summer due to temperatures and altitude. United and Southwest are the dominant airlines in the region and they tend to be 737.
ASE is a challenging landing. ASE is 8000 feet long at 7680 feel elevation. It is basically one way in and out. I was told by a Skywest training captain the the max weight single engine escape only guarantees 50 feet of ground clearance which sounds pretty scary to me. Only a small number of Skywest crews are allowed to operate to Aspen. I think that is a Skywest rule, not an FAA rule.
Another issue is ASE does not have WAAS which several nearby airports do. It seems unclear but it appears Skywest RJ's are not WAAS enabled.
I was told there is no STC to provide WAAS in the RJ but cannot confirm this.
Certainly for mountain operations in the winter WAAS would be nice. I suspect there are a lot of avionics upgrades not available to the RJ
We have a local gadfly who has many in the Valley convinced that there are all sorts of green electric planes ready to fly so we should not upgrade the airport at all.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks
The issue isn’t being able to fly a particular approach, it’s the ability of larger aircraft to fly an extraction should they not be able to land close in. A study from about 3-4 years ago suggested with larger aircraft that there might be a point where the aircraft is committed to landing, a scary prospect given the unpredictable winds and opposite direction traffic.
As to upgrading to achieve WAAS capability, it would take changing out the Collins 4200 FMS and a number of LRU boxes to achieve that. No business case can be made for an aircraft that close to being replaced in ASE.
By what measure does a 737 Max 8 use half the fuel of a 700? CASM? Certainly isn’t total fuel burn.