Spring/Summer 1964

There are so many stories that can be told about Aspen Airways and all of the successes and tragedies it went through during its years of operations.  Like the time the pilot was being so careful to go through the landing check list that he forgot to put the landing gear down.  How about the moment that Walter Paepcke knew that Bert Simons was running the airline so well he decided to make it a full-fledged airline?  Prior to that, Aspen Airways operated as the flight department for the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. 

The airline owned a number of different aircraft over the years, starting with a small fleet of Used DC-3’s.  They proved so successful that they worked themselves out of a job.  The airline replaced the DC-3’s with Convairs, first the Model 240, then upgraded to the 340’s and eventually the modified 340’s known as JetProp 580’s.  These, too, would pass and eventually be replaced with BAe 146 4-engine jets.  Now that you know a bit more about the airline, we need to rewind back to the days when the airline operated the Douglas DC-3’s.

The summers were slow for the airline especially in the spring known as the “off season.”  Aspen Airways was an “unscheduled” airline at the time.  That meant it did not have to fly if there were no customers.  Often the schedule would be modified so they could make their flight to and from Denver only once there were enough people needing a ride.

In the spring of 1964 I remember going out to the airport to see a family friend, Richard J. “Dick” Bird, who flew for the airline.  He had promised to give us a tour of the DC-3 that was in the hangar.  On this particular day we were told not to go near the left engine.   With our tour underway, midsentence I could wait no longer, I had to know why we could not go near that engine.  Had Captain Bird not said anything about it at all, I would have never given the left engine a thought, but now it was off limits and I had to know why. 

Small airlines back then did things their way.  It was a “kinder, gentler” industry back in the 1960’s and Aspen Airways was no exception.  Captain Bird informed us all that a bird had nested in the left engine’s oil cooler intake.  Since the airline was not busy this time of year and they had other DC-3’s they could use.  They decided to hangar this bird until those birds had hatched and moved on.  In an emergency, they would simply move the nest for the duration of the flight and put it back.  But as luck would have it, the nest was never disturbed.

Now that’s a bird of another feather.