Crowded Iqaluit airport to get more breathing room

JOHN THOMPSON

Traffic through the Iqaluit International Airport has swollen over the past decade, to 107,000 last year from about 66,000 passengers in 1994.

In another decade, that number is projected to reach 130,000 passengers.

Half of Nunavut’s population uses the airport to receive perishable food and cargo, and 40 per cent of Nunavut passengers arrive at or depart from Iqaluit.

One-quarter of all aircraft activity in Nunavut flies through this airport. These figures don’t include charters, military aircraft or international flights. If they did, they’d be considerably higher.

Add it all up, and you have one of the fastest growing airports in the country.

This summer, the federal government committed $10.7 million towards airport improvements. That money will go towards repaving two unused swaths of concrete and installing lights and proper signage in the areas.

The first section is called Apron II, which will serve as a larger parking lot for planes. That’s because the area where planes queue up becomes packed during busy periods.

“There are times when basically nothing can move here,” said airport manager John Graham.

The second section to be upgraded is Taxi Alpha, an off-ramp from the runway that will save smaller aircraft from having to taxi to the far end.

The runway stretches over 9,000 feet, and if its asphalt were laid out in road-sized lengths, it would carry on for 30 kilometres — enough to pave all of Iqaluit. Every summer maintenance workers pour 10 tons of tar over the tarmac to prevent water from working its way into the cracks and into the runway’s base.

The new taxiway is expected to increase the possible number of flights by 40 per cent.

Neither section of the runway has seen much work since the 1960s, Graham said. The taxi-way is currently only gravel, used solely by maintenance vehicles. Work on both sections is to begin next summer, starting with blasting in one corner of the airport to produce enough gravel for paving.

Work is also underway by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority to install luggage screening devices at the airport, which should be up and running in the next few months. The new screening units have squeezed airlines out of their offices behind the counters in the terminal lobby. To make room for more office space, an expansion, which juts out into the passenger parking lot, was grafted onto the terminal this summer.

Rather than try to match the terminal’s bright yellow façade, the extension is white and blue. The cost of matching the paint was prohibitive, Graham said, and it wouldn’t have looked the same because the terminal’s fiberglass panels have aged for 20 years. “It would still look like an addition, which is exactly what it is.”

The airport’s master plan, written in 1999, includes provisions for a new terminal at some point in the future. The current terminal was designed to accommodate just 70,000 passengers annually.

This is where numbers become tricky, Graham warns, because what’s important is the peak period. There are times of the week when the airport terminal seems abandoned, but on busy afternoons the building bustles with activity.

The history of Frobisher Bay as a settlement begins with its airport, built by the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942-43 as a stepping-stone for aircraft to Britain during World War II. In fact, the First Air hanger could be the oldest building in Iqaluit, Graham said. The original terminal was a lean-to built against the side of that building.

Expansion began during the mid-1950s, with an extension added to the runway and the construction of a new taxi-way. At the height of the Cold War, Iqaluit served as a refueling base for the American Air Force’s KC135 Boeing Stratotankers.

In 1957, the federal department of transport took over the airport from the Royal Canadian Air Force. At that time, flights from Los Angeles to London frequently used Frobisher Bay as a stop-over point.

Today, thousands of corporate jets use the airport to refuel every year. Most of them are headed for or returning from Europe. A 400-person jumbo jet can be seen stopping, usually for a passenger medical emergency, about once a month.

“It’s so regular it’s not news any more. Here, it’s commonplace,”

During the 1940s the airport never really was used for its original purpose as a stopover to Britain, Graham said. Other airstrips, like the one in Goose Bay, were used instead.

The airport waited another six decades for the Canadian government to buy 15 Cormorant helicopters from Britain in 2001, which hop-scotched from the United Kingdom to the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland before touching down in Iqaluit.

“That was actually charting the same route in reverse.”