squircle
New Member
Thanks for that information. It's reassuring to know I'm not mis-remembering parallel approaches in good weather.
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Pickering Airport (Transport Canada/GTAA, Proposed)
- Thread starter wyliepoon
- Start date
TrickyRicky
Senior Member
Interesting and informative debate, if at times way above my head (pun?).
The fundamental argument is would Pickering represent gross overbuild? I have no idea but in general I don’t think there are many City regions where there is less danger of overbuild burned into the cultural DNA.
If anything on balance we tend to build things 10 years too late and too small/under-capacity. Where we make mistakes tends to be were we orphan infrastructure by truncating what should be a bigger investment or where we chose the wrong priority in a sequence.
The fundamental argument is would Pickering represent gross overbuild? I have no idea but in general I don’t think there are many City regions where there is less danger of overbuild burned into the cultural DNA.
If anything on balance we tend to build things 10 years too late and too small/under-capacity. Where we make mistakes tends to be were we orphan infrastructure by truncating what should be a bigger investment or where we chose the wrong priority in a sequence.
Midtown Urbanist
Superstar
Prime example being of course, the new Union Station.
MarkBrooks
Active Member
It is impossible to understate the urgency of the jet runway capacity shortage In Toronto. The problem of Pearson’s limited runway capacity is already manifested today at peak periods. Cant imagine what it is going to be like over the next 10 years before Pickering can open.
Pearson is already turning away some traffic at peak times by using a technique call “ Flow control” where regional aircraft ( northern Ontario & Quebec) are not given Clearence to takeoff until they have room in the flow going into Pearson. Soon a number of smaller aircraft, beach 1900s and crjs may be turned away entirely.
Until the new airport is built the GTAA will get its way by both adding additional night flights ( already three times the number heathrow allows, 5000 vs 16000 a year ) and attempting to push well past the hourly movements achieved at other large jet airports.
Toronto is about to become a grand aviation experiment, stuffing more aircraft onto a runway per hour, day in day out, than any other snow belt airport has every consistently achieved.
It’s an experiment that unfortunately may cost lives as well as choke our economic efficiency , generate extra pollution and keep a lot of us up at night.
So no, I don’t think there is any danger of overbuilding.
SaugeenJunction
Senior Member
treplow
Active Member
I know there are a lot of sound arguments for not allowing jets at Billy Bishop, but seems like Toronto sure could use that extra capacity right about now.
Woodbridge_Heights
Senior Member
Jets can be quieter than props... *shrug*
MarkBrooks
Active Member
Yes, Billy Bishop is the model in airport efficiency, often with less than 5 minutes from push back to airborne. Local, accessible aviation capacity, A stark contrast to Pearson’s megahub model and long taxi times. Pearson is now in the bottom 10% of major North America airports for on time arrivals, dead last in Jan/ Feb at 61%. And it’s trending down. Pickering will take 10 years to build, meanwhile It’s time to spread the load however we can.
https://pickeringairport.org/toronto-dead-last-again-pearsons-on-time-performance-calamity/
https://pickeringairport.org/toronto-dead-last-again-pearsons-on-time-performance-calamity/
cereal
New Member
Billy bishop maybe highly efficient technically (most likely due its size) but that doesn't seem to have any impact on service levels from operators like Porter. They barely have 50% on time performance, and their customer service levels are imploding these past few years. Adding jets will not make anything better.
rbt
Senior Member
I'm not sure Billy Bishop comparisons are helpful. It's a very different scale of operations. Pearson also had a good operations record when it had 3 million passengers per year.
The article is interesting but I'm not sure I would have the same conclusion from the data it presents. First thing that stands out is YVR also having comparably poor on-time performance. How does Montreal or Calgary stack up? On-time is as compared to scheduled time, with airlines setting the schedule. Is Pearsons late performance distributed across all airlines evenly or is it clustered around the big Canadian airlines only (WestJet and Air Canada).
What I'm getting at with these questions is do we have a Pearson problem, a Canadian airport problem (YYZ and YVR are the only ones on the chart), or a Canadian airline problem (overly aggressive scheduling). Any of these could cause poor numbers at Pearson; and Picking can't fix the last 2 situations.
It feels like you jumped to the conclusion a bit quickly.
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kEiThZ
Superstar
I'm a okay with that. Why the hell is 20-seater taking up a slot at Pearson? And CRJs (200s) can and should slowly be phased out. 50-seater RJs are terrible for the environment, extremely economically inefficient and all but indefensible in the age of a massive pilot shortage. Drop them.
Nothing with less than 70 seats should be landing at Pearson as part of scheduled ops. And if your podunk town can't support more than 120 PDEW to Pearson, you shouldn't have a flight to Toronto.
Pure FUD.
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micheal_can
Senior Member
If that is the case, you would need to scale up a major commuter airport with a fast link to Pearson. I am thinking of places like Thunder Bay, Sault St Marie and Timmins that are too far to reasonably drive from, but that would still need to service Toronto,.
MarkBrooks
Active Member
Thus the need for Pickering, now your getting it! But just to be clear, a new CRJ 900 gets 5 liters per 100 km per seat, not as good as a dream liner (2.7 lites per 100 km per seat) or an airbus 319 neo is 1.93 liters per hundred km per seat. All are a far cry from the bad old days of 15-20 liters per 100 km per seat of the orginal jets. Beech 1900 is about 6.5-7 l/100km per seat.
But full picture carbon emissions means accounting for the fuel burned driving to the airport as well as the fuel used by flight to and from the airport. Thus Pickering airport east central location is key to a carbon friendly future.
kEiThZ
Superstar
There's a difference between "we need service" and "we need half a dozen slots per day of 37 and 50 seater flights to Pearson". There's no reason some of these flights can't be consolidated onto larger 70-100 seat aircraft.
All three of the cities you mentioned have 5-6 flights a day which could be consolidated onto 2-3 rotation per day. We don't need an entire other airport and shuttles across town to accommodate that traffic. Aside from the fact that Air Canada would never agree to having its feeder network split between two airports. Heck, they'd fight splitting it between two terminals at Pearson. And rightly so. It'd be terrible for business and efficiency.
When in lived in the US, I lived in one of richest counties in the country. A place where people actually commuted by private jet to the Bay Area. The local airport served a catchment of about a quarter million and still saw only 2-3 flights per day to each of three hub cities between two major carriers. Why is it that we insist that towns of less than 50k (Timmins) or 80k (Soo) or 160k (Sudbury) with lower per capita incomes, need to have nearly half a dozen flights a day to the biggest airport in the country?
Towns like these can do just fine on 2-3 Q400 or CRJ900 runs, of 70-80 seats each. All they need is a morning, evening and maybe a midday flight. And if they want to fly downtown and don't intend to transit at Pearson, Porter provides that connection at YTZ. So what's the use of another airport here?
If anything, what these towns need are flights to cities other than Toronto. It boggles the mind that none of these three cities (particularly Timmins and Sudbury) have flights to Ottawa or Montreal. A result of forcing all traffic through Pearson.
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kEiThZ
Superstar
Why don't you post the fuel consumption of the Dash-8s that Jazz actually flies to these cities? You and I both know that number would be closer to the Beech than it would be to a CR9. Forcing schedule consolidation onto larger aircraft cuts emissions and reduces costs for the airline. And you know that AC would do this before they ever considered relocating those flights to Pickering.