Was Jeff Bezos to blame for major delays at the Eagle County airport over the holidays?

The Eagle County Regional Airport saw quite a few extended delays last weekend during its busiest week of the year.

During the holidays, the airport is often the second busiest airport in the state behind Denver International Airport, with much of the traffic coming from private jets.

Amid all the delays, speculation started circulating on social media that a party for Jeff Bezos at a popular Aspen sushi restaurant was to blame, as the Amazon CEO hosted a dinner with guests including Ivanka Trump and Kevin Costner.

---

---

David Reid, the director of aviation at the airport, said runway priority is based on when the flight plan is filed, regardless of the flight being private or commercial. But whether or not the bumps experienced in Eagle were due to Bezos’ party is hard to say — as the county airport was bound to be inundated with private jet traffic over the holiday season regardless of the billionaire CEO’s plans.

“Air traffic control won’t dictate between general aviation and commercial in that instance, so no other priority is used,” Reid said.

---

---

On Dec. 27, American Airlines flight 4799 was delayed by eight hours as rumors were circulating that Bezos was planning on heading into Colorado for a $600 million wedding.

Bezos denied the claim on X, saying, “This whole thing is completely false — none of this is happening.”

Eagle County local Dan Purtell was on American Airlines flight 4799 from Phoenix on Dec. 27 and said it was supposed to leave in the morning, but once per hour or so, the passengers received an update from airline staff who told them that weather delays were postponing the flight.

“At one point I happened to be up at the counter and overheard one of the attendants on the phone saying the absolute latest we could take off was 3:50 p.m.,” Purtell said. “They kept telling us every hour the weather is causing delays, but wouldn’t you know it, at exactly 3:50 p.m. we took off.”

The flight was supposed to be nonstop to Gypsum, but it ended up landing in Denver.

“I just felt like we were being lied to the whole time,” Purtell said. “We all knew people in Eagle who said there were sunny skies there, and planes were coming in all the time, yet here we were being told we were delayed due to weather.”

That’s when some of the passengers started seeing the social media posts about Bezos’ wedding.

“And Bezos says none of this is true, but the next day he’s spotted in Aspen, so obviously some of it was true,” Purtell said. “It just seems unfair to the regular people flying into Eagle, we’re told ‘let’s use our local airport more, let’s make this work,’ we’re offered incentives and everything else, but then when we actually do that, we just get treated like second-class citizens and bumped by the billionaires.”

Reid said it wasn’t necessarily weather in the Eagle County area causing the weather delays.

“The bulk of our issues involved weather around the country at other airports,” he said.

But Reid also acknowledged that an abundance of traffic also caused delays.

“The FAA air traffic control tower in Denver needed to meter the heavy holiday traffic into mountain airports,” he said. “Primarily Rifle, Aspen and Eagle on Thursday (Dec. 26), Friday (Dec. 27) and Saturday (Dec. 28).”

Guests said Dec. 29 saw heavy delays as well.

“Our EGE to Den flight was delayed on Sunday by four and a half hours which made us miss our connection,” said Nicole Sale-Harper.

Sale-Harper was flying on United Airlines with her mother, who said she heard one employee explain to another that the delays were due to the airport exceeding the number of flights that could land within an hour.

“Kudos to most employees for keeping their cool,” Sale-Harper said.

The Eagle County airport’s tower is a contract tower, which means the Federal Aviation Administration has an agreement with a private contractor to staff the facility. The contractor is a company called SERCO.

“SERCO falls under the FAA umbrella as far as procedures and policy with national airspace,” Reid said. “Denver Center/Denver TRACON (FAA) controls all of the airspace in Colorado, with our local tower controlling our immediate airspace after an aircraft is released from the overarching Denver Center airspace.”