Puvirnituq airport to get total makeover

This summer will see the construction of a $3.8-million garage at Puvirnituq’s airport.

Inside Puvirnituq’s new air terminal the qamutik theme will play out on the wooden “flying qamutik” ceiling of the new building.

The apron at Puvirnituq’s airport is being doubled this summer to accommodate the jets which now use its extended runway.

Puvirnituq will see a $6.5-million air terminal, scheduled to open late in 2011. The design is inspired by a qamutik.

Charges are underway at Puvirnituq’s airport, where this year will see the doubling of the apron where aircraft park, a new garage and work started on a posh new air terminal.

For the $6.5-million terminal, the community suggested a qamutik theme to Alain Fournier, an architect with Fournier, Gersovitz, Moss and Associates, and that’s what guided his final design.

If you look at the outside of the image of the copper-clad terminal, you’ll see qamutik-inspired decorations— which are intended to look almost as if someone leaned a giant-sized qamutik against the wall and left it there.

Inside, the qamutik theme is carried on, with the terminal’s undulating wooden roof recalling a moving— or as Fournier put it— “flying qamutiks.”

When the terminal’s passenger area is finished, you’ll see a steel qamutik laden with one or two large sculptures by local carvers— thanks to Quebec’s art integration program, which puts about one per cent of every public building’s cost back into art for the building.

A blown-up image of a print by the great, late artist Davidaluk Amittu will be moved from the present terminal when the new one is finished.

Travellers will have much more room in the new terminal— at 10,000 square feet, it will be about four times larger than the existing terminal.

As in Kuujjuaq’s recently-built air terminal— which Fournier also designed, there will be airline counters, baggage rooms, a security section and a space for a retail operation. The terminal’s exterior will be wrapped in metal cladding, with airtight walls and double vestibules at the entrances to hold heat during the winter.

While there’s no security now in place at the Puvirnituq airport, a space has been left for the equipment, which many want to see in operation— this would mean aircraft leaving Puvirnituq would no longer have to make a scheduled stop in La Grande before heading on to Montreal.

Unlike the new air terminal in Kuujjuaq, Puvirnituq’s terminal features a built-in radio tower.

And also, unlike Kuujjuaq’s terminal, Puvirnituq’s won’t be a certified “green building”— with solar panels and the like– so that no special maintenance will be required.

It’s not only the air terminal that’s changing in Puvirnituq.

Nunavik’s co-operative network, Fédération des co-opératives du Nouveau-Québec, also plans to build a $3.8-million airport garage this summer— as part of the massive makeover of Puvirnituq’s airport.

The old garage and terminal will stay in place until the new structures are fully operational — then they may be moved and find a new use in the community.

The evolution of the air terminal in Puvirnituq shows the progress of air transportation along Nunavik’s Hudson Bay coast, which has changed from makeshift airstrips to jet service in the past 20 years.

Before the early 1990s when an air terminal was finally built in Puvirnituq, then known as Povungnituk — check-ins took place at the informal Air Inuit counter in town and baggage pick-up meant the passenger picked up his or her own bag after it was tossed on to the ground, and often into the snow.

Frequent flyers back in the 1980s can recall how landings on the community’s shorter-than-average runway were heart-stopping at the best of times.

As for the take-offs, pilots would back the Twin Otters up as far as they could to the end of the 900-foot strip, clamp the brakes down hard and push the engines to full power until every single rivet and tooth in the plane shook, and only then would they let suddenly the brakes go and head into the air.