News and notes from around the interweb:
- FAA tells Aspen airport to cut out the games and allow Embraer 175s to fly there because limiting operations to CRJ-700s is nonsense. Local anti-airport groups want to give up federal airport grants so that the FAA can’t dictate to them but it doesn’t work that way, Aspen has already taken the money.
It doesn’t even sound like the upgrades are that substantial, but are more an artificial limit the airport has been forced into implementing.
The NIMBY group claims the CRJ-700s will fly for another 30 years and no upgrade is needed, but we know that’s essentially a lie. The aircraft may be capable of flying for that long, but they will be uneconomic in fairly short order. The aircraft has basically become a bottom-tier quality product for airlines and the ASE market is also prime for a more robust premium product that it really can’t offer.
- Hyatt: Register by August 30 to earn 1,000 bonus points per night plus double elite night credits at 15 hotels in Florida through September 30, 2024. Capped at 20 nights of earning.
- Oakland airport Hilton to close August 28th “The stretch of Hegenberger where the Hilton is located…is among the most crime-plagued areas of the city.” (HT: @crucker) And here I thought Oakland had a lot of crime in the ’80s.
- New York City minimum wage rule for rideshare drivers is cutting their pay in half? Uber is limiting driver access to the platform during low-demand periods, because the government rule is that drivers get paid for time they aren’t driving. (HT: @crucker)
Uber Technologies Inc. has begun locking New York City drivers out of its app during periods of low demand in an attempt to fight a minimum wage rule, and Lyft Inc. is threatening to do the same. As a result, some drivers say their wages have fallen by as much as 50%.
- What do y’all think of this – a cool protest of invasive security procedures, or giving a hard time to low paid civil servants?
The shirt pic.twitter.com/xWXbNTflPp
— Clown World ™ (@ClownWorld_) June 25, 2024
- Meanwhile, at the Virgin Hotel Nashville…
Thanks to a wealth of musicians and dwindling opportunities for them to make a living, the city has become a hot spot for employees of America’s biggest companies to bond while writing lyrics about corporate values and new product lines. …
The crowd split into four teams, each assigned a Kicksaw corporate value. Banks led her team to a hotel balcony, where they hammered out the words and melody for their song about the value “Keep It Simple.”
The process was halting at first, but a chorus started to take shape. They needed a lyric to insert between the first and last lines, and employees threw out suggestions. “Partner for success,” said one. “Help us help you,” was another. More phrases followed. …
Eventually the group settled on a chorus: “Gonna get you through it, Kick that cloud to Kicksaw, and keep it simple, stupid.”
FWIW, the people opposing the expansion of ASE basically live at the end of the runway, were there long before the airport became the third busiest in Colorado, and just want to avoid a similar situation of what it is like visiting the Costco next to EGE.
I lived for a while across the highway from Aspen airport and even with abutments blocking the noise it could get pretty loud when some wanted to save the brakes on their G5 by running the thrust reversers on full power on the runway. What I’d like to see is if allowing larger aircraft in might actually reduce the number of flights per day.
Will NYC ever understand the law of unintended consequences? Or did they really think that companies like Uber and Lyft will just become a new welfare provider, paying people who they didn’t even hire as employees to do nothing? Just another example of how everything leftists claim to want to achieve, their policies result in the exact opposite.
A: unintended consequences do not include non-union employees getting screwed by their employer. Über was screwing them before, and they’re screwing them now.
B: why is it that my crotch lights up only on TSA scanners, and the rest of the world has no need to ensure that my package is not packing non-amorous heat?
C. The sad part is that Chat GPT 3.5 probably has better ideas for lyrics, but I suppose if the company’s paying, you put up with the cringe during the day, and bitch about colleagues over drinks after dinner. Nothing says “team building” like getting wrecked.
Probably a bunch of white liberal types crying about the crj-700 in aspen.
Oakland has made it’s choice and it prefers criminals to legitimate business like Hilton.
Just bring back Aspen Airways Convair 580’s or the Rocky Mtn. Dash-8s into ASE!
Good thing they changed the name of the airport in Oakland. It just needs a llittle time to kick in before things will start to turn around.
So, Bubba, those who voluntarily work for Uber/Lyft are getting screwed. Why, then, do you think they work for them?
Pilot here. Aspen demands the very best in airplane and pilot performance. The Roaring Fork Valley is littered with aluminum from planes that shouldn’t have flown in there, pilots that lacked the skill and experience and owners who made sure their pilots understood that they HAD to get in – regardless of conditions.
I have several thousand hours flying the CRJ-700 in and out of ASE. I also have several thousand more hours flying the E-175. It’s a matter of performance. The E-175 simply doesn’t have the performance to climb out with a sufficient margin of safety if an engine fails at a critical point in the approach. The CRJ-700 just barely has enough. My former company also has other variants of the CRJ. And they lack the required performance as well.
Having practiced several “emergency extraction procedures” with the airplane yelling, “TERRAIN, TERRAIN, PULL UP, PULL UP” as you nearly scrape the ridges – it’s not something you’d want to experience. Thankfully, mine were in a simulator.
Agree with Mike Finch’s comments. I’m a private pilot flying a high performance single engine aircraft. Mine is lighter and slower than the jets he flies, but even for an airplane like mine, flying to Aspen is something I will ONLY consider in the best possible of weather circumstances, Aspen is a very challenging airport to operate from due to the high altitude and high terrain. This is one (of many instances) that politicians NEED to defer to the professionals that know better what is safe or not to do.