Business View Magazine | Volume 8, Issue 7

109 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 8, ISSUE 7 EAGLE COUNTY REGIONAL A I RPORT valley, and the mountains and forests provide not just skiing and winter sports but also river sports, hiking, biking – a year-round outdoor playground!” Welcome to Eagle County and its thriving Regional Airport. With a single 9000-foot runway, this is the second busiest airport in Colorado and offers commercial service from three major airlines: American, Delta, and United with non- stop winter service to 13 major cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York (JFK & LGA), Newark, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. There is also year-round service to Denver and Dallas. “Eighty percent of the airport’s operations occur during the winter,” Reid reports, “however, the summer traffic is also picking up and this summer we’ll have all three airlines servicing us. Vail Valley Jet Centre is our FBO and they handle the General Aviation side of things. There are privately owned hangars, as well as some of our own on the north side of the property. Vail Valley has its own terminal handling the GA traffic. It is a top-of-the-line operation with a beautiful facility. Then there is the Air National Guard HAATS Facility which we partner with on the north end of the facility.” HAATS or High-Altitude Aviation Training Site is a million-acre facility based out of the airport, which trains pilots to fly helicopters at high altitude, with less oxygen. With more and more deployment in mountainous regions like Afghanistan, this facility makes quite a difference in the preparedness of pilots. Eagle County Regional Airport has come a long way from its humble beginnings as an emergency landing strip on the Denver to Los Angeles air route of the 1930s. The Airport itself was dedicated on Sept. 14, 1947. It was a small airport, seeing just a few hundred passengers a