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| Eighteen passengers, on a good day. |
Louis Shalako
What would happen if we gave up Sarnia Airport?
Would we ever be able to replace it?
How much
passenger traffic would it take to sustain Sarnia Airport at a break-even or
even profitable level? How much does it even cost, and is there any benefit, in
sustaining the thing in limbo for any great length of time. Is there any
potential for that sustainable level of air traffic in the local market,
barring any great increase in the local population, which doesn’t seem very
likely in the short term.
The population of Sarnia and Sarnia-Lambton has been
stable, if not stagnant, for many years. We do have a sizable population of
foreign students, who may or may not stick around for the longer term. Foreign
students are, for the most part, not buying five or six hundred thousand dollar
new-build homes, and they don’t take affordable, geared-to-income housing
because they aren’t eligible. What they do take, are apartments, in the lower
range of the scale in terms of pricing. They take them for the short term,
which means when they vacate landlords can take a look at the local going rate
and jack the rents accordingly.
How much land is involved in the operation of Sarnia
Airport. What happens if the airport loses any certifications that it might
have. What are the chances of any major or smaller air-carrier bringing passenger
or charter flight services to the Sarnia area? How long can we hang on, waiting
for such an outcome.
If we closed Sarnia Airport to any flight operations
at all, what would we do with it? Is there any real chance of replacing Sarnia
Airport, in some other location, at some future date. That doesn’t seem very
likely. Where else would you put it, and if there really are economic benefits,
how would we like seeing those benefits going to a neighbouring municipality.
Use it or lose it, in other words.
What value does private flying, what value does a
small flight school, what economic or social benefit, or any other public good does that bring to the
municipality. If they lost the privilege, where would all the private pilots and flight students go?
What upgrades would be required to bring Sarnia
Airport up to snuff, in order to attract any air carrier to the Sarnia area.
Where is the demand. Back in the 1960s, ‘Great Lakes Aviation’ operated air
services, flying DC-3s of WW II vintage on short, regional routes. These were
twin-engine tail-draggers of about 28 passengers. This was superseded by ‘Air
Ontario’, flying Convair 440 aircraft; piston-engine, twin-engine aircraft with
nose-wheel landing gear. Those were good for 52 passengers, they were noisy,
nearing the end of their service life, and no doubt expensive to maintain.
For some years, small, twin-engine turbine aircraft
provided the service, for the life of me I cannot recall the name of the
company…
In a personal note, my buddy Bill Stone and I rode our
little banana bikes out to the airport, from the Bright St. and Germain Park
area, when we were twelve or thirteen years old. (It was summer and we fished
for catfish and suckers out there in Wawanosh Drain as well.) We went into the
‘new’ terminal and got an airline schedule from the nice lady behind the
counter…the security guard sort of grinned and shook his head when he saw us
coming. I guess you could say we liked aircraft. We rode out there to see them
landing and taking off. It’s probably a good thing our parents didn’t know too
much about all this—
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| The cockpit of the Convair 440. |
Late on many a hot summer night, with the windows open, laying in bed, one could hear the bigger planes landing at Sarnia Airport. They would put the propellers into reverse pitch, pushing full throttle, in order to brake on the relatively short runway—rather than plunge off the NW end of the runway and fall into Wawanosh Drain. We used to go out there and cluster at the end of the runway when Canada’s Snowbirds came and went, although it has been a while…considering the age of the Tudor training aircraft, perhaps that is understandable. Our age, too.
Some of this was before the opening of the Highway 402
in about 1980. Traffic between Sarnia and London meant travelling on the
two-lane, very narrow Highway 22, which did have one centre passing lane—one
result of which was head-on collisions when folks misjudged the distance and
the speed. This community doesn’t support the costs of passenger rail traffic, it all has to be subsidized at a
loss, and one wonders about the intercity bus service as well. It’s all very
well to read about it or see it on the evening news. What is it like to
actually ride upon it…??? Ten or eleven people on a train going one hundred
kilometres, isn’t very profitable, or ticket prices quickly become prohibitive.
***
How much would all that cost, and would the economic,
spin-off benefits offset those costs.
This holds true for any form of transportation
service.
What
would happen if an actual cruise ship, actually docked in Sarnia Harbour…and
what would that actually do for downtown…???
What
would it do for Bright’s Grove. This is where most of
our politicians live, after all.
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| The real question we need to ask ourselves here, is what would this do for Bright's Grove. |
What alternative uses might the existing airport
footprint support, bearing in mind Badger Daylighting and other services
onsite, and bearing in mind present and future zoning requirements. How does
this all fit into the official plan?
Surrounding the airport are areas zoned for
agriculture, commercial and light industrial. There are farms and residences
along Telfer Road, Michigan Avenue and Blackwell Road. There are businesses
along London Line, including the municipal business park.
How would they be affected by major changes to the site, and how would that be perceived. They’ve lived with it this long, what would they think if the land was sold off for some major industrial operation? It is the largest single parcel of land in the city--it is available, in some sense.
Some kind of mega battery or EV plant might fit
there—only problem there is, we still lose the airport and the NIMBYs would be
well and truly out for blood…
Backtracking just a little bit, there is plenty of
room already, for middle-class and high-end housing development. Called Zone 2, it’s in the official plan. An increase in development land near Bright’s Grove
has been rejected the last I have heard. Any form of affordable,
geared-to-income housing will be a hard sell in any neighbourhood, this in
spite of all the efforts of ineffectual do-gooders, (sandals-wearing,
shorts-wearing, floral shirts-wearing, weak and ineffectual,
slightly-incompetent socialist bureaucrat-gender-tag-wearing people), going
down on the riverbank and burning candles in order to raise awareness of the
need to reduce stigma, which they have just reinforced with the success in
getting front-page coverage with what is an otherwise bogus endeavour…to put
that sort of development in an area that is ‘desirable’, merely rubs salt in
the wounds of the long-suffering bourgeoisie. Who, as we all know, have been
having it pretty rough lately.
We already have thousands
of approvals, very few of which represent ‘shovels in the ground’. Many of
them have simply been forgotten.
Perhaps the Ineos/Styrolutions site will come
available soon, and of course this is much more suitable when you consider the
encampment at Rainbow Park, and the fact that the intersection of Tashmoo and
Churchill Road/Highway 40 is so much closer to the addictions and mental health
services people require—or does that sound snarky. We could always bus them in—the social workers, I mean.
We could always nail up a sign and call it a ‘leper
colony’, or ‘Free Gaza’, or ‘Ford City’, or something like that.
It’s crazy enough, it might just work. Why, that big
old airport can house any number of homeless people, in tiny little fibreglass veal-calf sheds, or maybe we could just put in a few hundred McMansions for the
Sarnia City Councilor Bill Dennis’s of this world.
END
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| They just liked aircraft. |
So, here’s this story where Council was looking to sell Sarnia Airport.
Here’s a Master Plan for Sarnia Airport. Be prepared for your bum to fall asleep.
This link is from 2018. Some Canadian journalist really ought to follow up.
Okay,leaving Sarnia for Toronto at 8:40 a.m. $48.00VIA rail. One would hope there is some kind of return ticket—
Red Wigglers, the Cadillac of Worms. Because you never know when you’re going to fish in Wawanosh Drain.
DC-3A Great Lakes Aviation.
The Sarnia Airport claims hundreds of thousands of trips in 2019. This seems like nonsense, what is a ‘catchment area’ and how can the local population produce 472,000 trips.
The last air carrier at Sarnia Airport operated aircraft very similar to the Jetstream.
Louis Shalako has books and stories abounding upon Amazon.
Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.
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