Business View Magazine | May 2019

145 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MAY 2019 YAMPA VALLEY REGIONAL A I RPORT on the area’s snow cover. “Then we’re staffed at our greatest, because that’s when our demand is highest,” Booth notes. “Currently, we have direct flights on five major air carriers to 15 different cities. So, this time of year, my staff is about 80; and then in the off-season, when our direct flight program goes down to one or two flights a day, we go down to a staff of about 30 for about eight months out of the year. That’s just my staff, the county employees. All told, this time of year, we have almost 500 employees at the Airport that work here – the ground handlers, the airlines, and the tenant organizations that lease space in the terminal.” In addition to its commercial service, the Airport also has about a dozen home-based GA aircraft. “We do have a robust GA operation, but a lot of it is drop off and pick up,” Booth avers. “It’s a lot of executive jet traffic with a lot smaller percentage of piston, so, it’s mostly turboprop and jet.” There are also daily cargo flights from UPS and FedEx. Regarding its commercial airline service, Booth admits that Yampa Valley maintains a slight competitive relationship with three nearby, peer competitors in the mountain resort airport business: Eagle County Airport, which serves Vail; the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport; and the Jackson Hole Airport in Wyoming. “I’m not really competing day-to-day,” he claims. “But, we do compare ourselves with them, certainly, in the costs to the airlines to fly in here, and the kind of service we provide. And we do have advantages for the airlines in that we have a longer runway than any of the other facilities. And we really are blessed for a mountain resort airport, in that we don’t have significant issues with high terrain. And we have a radar system that was installed here as the first of its kind that gives the FAA and Denver Center the ability to control right down to ground level and see airplanes taxiing on our ramp - that’s the wide area multilateration system (a ground- based surveillance system that can be installed in areas where radar is limited or not possible.)” Regarding the Airport’s GA traffic, Booth notes