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Originally Posted by Article
Anyone who has ever doubted that good things come to those who wait ought to pay a visit to Calgary International Airport.
Long the gateway to western Canada’s oil, gas and tourism industries, plans to build a new, 14,000-foot runway at the airport have been in the works since the early 1970s.
At the time, the airport – which is also widely known to aviators, passengers and the general public by its IATA code of ‘YYC’ – was still a fairly new acquisition of Transport Canada, the federal agency that oversees the nation’s transportation system.
Having bought the airport precisely because its previous owner, the City of Calgary, didn’t have the resources necessary for expansion, the agency set right to work building a new terminal to accommodate commercial jet traffic and assembling land for the addition of the runway.
The terminal opened in November 1977. Noise protection for the runway was put in place two years later. And then, the long wait began.
During the intervening years, the airport was privatised – a process that in itself took 10 years from announcement to completion – and blossomed into the engine of employment for more than 24,000 people in the greater Calgary area.
“It does seem that things take a long time to happen here,” chuckles Garth Atkinson, president and CEO of Calgary Airport Authority. “The upshot is that we build facilities when we really need them.
“We’re not building this runway in anticipation of traffic. We’re building it because we really, really need it. Frankly, it can’t come soon enough for us. It’s going to give us a real boost in capacity.”
In fact, the runway – set to be completed in May 2014 – is but one aspect of the C$2 billion expansion of Calgary International Airport that also includes the construction of a new terminal.
When it opens in 2015, the new concourse will double the airport’s square footage, while the new air traffic control tower – currently under construction by Nav Canada, the agency responsible for air navigation services in Canada – is rising outside Atkinson’s office window and is set for completion in December.
In the meantime, the airport authority is continuing to pursue a business strategy of developing industrial and business parks that complement – and utilise – the airport’s services.
And if this isn’t enough activity to make one’s head begin to spin, the City of Calgary is currently pouring concrete for the walls and roof of a new 620-metre tunnel that will pass under the new runway.
The C$294.8 million project, which will extend Airport Trail, a local roadway, is expected to be completed shortly before the new runway.
Ironically, the principal driver behind all this activity isn’t overhead – it’s under foot, in the oil fields and oil sands in the northern region of Alberta, Canada.
Flush with oil money and largely unscathed by the global financial crisis, these are boom times for western Canada, and the changing face of the airport is perhaps the boom’s purest reflection.
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