Improved Rating Awaits Another Summer’s Construction

TELLURIDE – A year after this evening’s celebration of the new runway at the Telluride Regional Airport, there will be an even bigger celebration, says airport manager Rich Nuttall.

By then, if all goes according to plan, the airport will have completed another summer’s worth of major construction, the third of four phases in the airport’s runway improvement plan. This third phase will finally bring the airport’s runway to a new safety category to a D-III, enabling it to accommodate the Bombardier Q400 airplane, capable of carrying 76 passengers.

Not that today’s celebration is anything to scoff at. It comes after $23 million in work last summer, removing the airport’s notorious dip. The first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, will be on hand for the occasion. With Armstrong in mind, one might be tempted to term the completion of Phase 2 as a “giant leap” for the airport.

Not that the next phase, budgeted at $17 million, is a small step.

But next summer’s work is unlikely to require more than a few weeks’ closure of the airport, if that. It involves the installation of safety areas on either end of the runway, and along its sides, and moving an existing taxiway out of the safety area.

Having been the airport’s manager since 1995, and despite the fact that the biggest job has been accomplished, Nuttall has grown philosophical about progress at the Telluride airport. Even after the airport is certified to receive bigger planes, there is no assurance that airlines will fly them here. To achieve a restoration of the airport’s commercial traffic to anything like what it was a decade ago will take a lot more work.

“I would like people to be aware that we’ve made some nice improvements,” Nuttall said on Tuesday. “And I would like people to know that we would like to see the airport utilized more.”

Back in the winter of 1992-93, his first year on the job, Nuttall recalls, the airport was served by six airlines and saw upward of 27,000 enplanements. Since 1995, he says, commercial traffic is down 49 percent.

The reason, he has long argued, is simple: the subsidy of flights by the Telluride and Montrose Regional Air Organization of flights into Montrose. Tax money from Telluride goes to support the Montrose airport, Nuttall observes, with an added impact of reducing revenues from traffic at Telluride – to the tune of millions of dollars over the last decade.

“None of us at the Telluride Airport has ever denied the value of direct jets to Montrose for a segment of the market,” Nuttall says with a sigh. “But we believe that the frequency of flights from Denver to Telluride needs to be increased. It’s a hard nut to crack, but we need some balance.”

The new runway rating should help, Nuttall says, but with the airline industry in a state of flux, it is never a sure bet that an airline will serve any market, no matter how new its runway. Since the installation of instruments at Telluride in December 1996, diversions due to weather are down significantly. History shows that the Telluride Airport can support far more commercial traffic than it has now: just four flights this winter, two from Denver and two from Phoenix.

Even after next year’s Phase 3 runway work is finished, the airport terminal will require improvements before it can accommodate Q400 flights – assuming an airline wants to add any here. The existing safety area is not large enough to hold 76 passengers, never mind more than that if the airport is handling more than one flight at a time.

The airport is conducting a study this winter to determine what it will cost to make that last necessary improvement before it can realistically hope to regain its commercial mojo.

Meanwhile, in Telluride on December 17, a major step on the way will be toasted.