Rankin Inlet airport ready to burst at the seams

At one point during the afternoon of Feb. 25, there were more than 10 aircraft of various sizes on the tarmac of the Rankin Inlet airport. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

People were crushed into the terminal of the Rankin Inlet airport Feb. 25 as they waited to catch flights or greet arriving passengers. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

On Feb. 25, Rankin Inlet’s airport was crammed way past its capacity.

Inside the terminal, about 200 people waited to catch flights or greet arriving passengers, while at about 2:30 p.m., 10 aircraft, ranging from small King Airs to 737 jets, vied for space on the apron.

A blizzard last week closed the Rankin Inlet airport for two days, causing a backlog in flights.

On Friday, the airport had reopened. but jets, arriving from all directions, waited there for connecting flights and passengers whose travel had already been delayed.

As a result, passengers on board a First Air flight en route from Yellowknife to Iqaluit waited nearly three hours for a flight to arrive from Baker Lake.

But even on a normal days, congestion is bad.

“There’s no room at the inn,” said Ron Erlandson, the assistant director of Nunavut airports.

Rankin Inlet’s capacity is so stretched every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons, when the big jets all arrive, the airport can no longer accept unapproved aircraft from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., Erlandson said during a presentation at the recent Kitikmeot trade show in Cambridge Bay.

The capacity problems are likely to get worse when the new correctional centre in Rankin Inlet opens.

There’s also a tendency on the part of airlines to schedule the arrival and departure of jet flights at the same time.

“If a competitor travels at peak time of day when everyone wants to go, you’re not going to say ‘well i’ll fly at the crappy time of day so we don’t fly at the same time.’

Who’s going to do that,” reflected Tracey Medve, president of Canadian North. “Who wants to risk losing a bunch of passengers because you’re traveling at a time because no one wants to fly?”

Added to the mix are the increasing numbers of charter aircraft heading to and from Baker Lake’s Meadowbank mine.

This rapid growth has left Rankin Inlet’s airport badly in need of expansion, confirms a report that the Government of Nunavut released last summer.

This report said the airport is far too small to handle the 40,000 or more annual passengers expected to travel through the facility over the next 20 years.

“The terminal building is now severely undersized and congested and the main apron and taxiway are unable to accommodate arriving and departing aircraft without compromising safety standards and experiencing excessive delays,” said the report, prepared by LPS Avia Consulting.

“Expansion of the air terminal building, apron and taxiway system are essential immediately.”

The report noted that yearly passenger traffic at the airport — Nunavut’s second busiest after Iqaluit — has already grown from 35,000 in 1999 to 55,000 today.

The report stated the Rankin Inlet airport is unusable 10 per cent of the time, due to a combination of bad weather and subpar electronic landing equipment, which plays havoc with flights.

The frequent unavailability of the airport interrupts the regional transportation network, prolongs business and personal travel and “increases the cost of living and doing business in Nunavut,” the report said.

The state of the airport’s landing system also disrupts medevac flights.

The report said Rankin Inlet “has by far the largest medical travel demand” in the territory because of the new regional health centre.

Rankin’s airport also needs runway and landing equipment upgrades to accommodate larger cargo aircraft.

In the short term, the report called for an expansion of the terminal and the construction of a new taxiway, a new terminal road and parking lot.

It pegged the cost of those improvements at $32.2 million.