Red Deer is the third largest city in the Canadian province of Alberta,
located halfway between Calgary and Edmonton, and is home to a population of over 100,000.
It’s also home to Red Deer Regional Airport,
which serves Central Alberta with plenty of general aviation and charter traffic.
Within the busy Calgary-Edmonton corridor, Red Deer Regional has traditionally been
a Class E airspace, with a flight service station providing information to pilots.
That changed on November 5th, 2020, as Nav Canada, Canada’s air service provider, introduced air
traffic control service 16 hours a day, with the airspace becoming Class D during that time.
ADAM DOWLING: Red Deer Flight Service has been in operation for many many years here in Red Deer,
providing airport advisory service to the flying community in Red Deer.
Back in about 2016, traffic started to increase, and that was due generally to the
influx of more training students coming into the area. Associated with that,
traffic began to ramp up and started to grow, up to around 60,000 movements a year in the
first year, that's up from the traditional around 45,000 they were handling per year.
Projection, and speaking with the flight schools they do want to grow their
operations here so we do anticipate more traffic all that is what played
into factors here in Red Deer, so with the earlier increases prior to 2019 and '20.
FSS provides an advisory service, not a control service,
so they'll advise pilots, give them information as best as they know,
and then pilots will from there take that information to make a decision.
That works well in a lot of environments, but once you get to a certain level of traffic,
it becomes too congested and you need to start giving more positive control.
So that was where the idea of Air Traffic Control came from,
so the letter was sent that we're going to convert the tower to an Air Traffic
Control facility in October of 2019, and so we progressed with the project.
The project basically began in November and started to gain momentum from there and it was...
everything was moving along quite well, and then, again, Covid hit and slowed things down.
So Red Deer obviously is a lot shorter than a traditional tower, with it being only a
two story operation, sight lines are lower than traditional, so what they've done here
is they've installed cameras at the far end of the runway, and they do feed into the tower,
so they do have ability to see the far into the runways to see over the buildings out there,
so the sight lines, while they're more challenging than a traditional tower,
they have put in some technology to help overcome that.
In addition to the flight schools, Red Deer’s also home to many other tenants,
including Buffalo Airways and Air Spray, both of whom have bases here.
These operators fly larger aircraft in and around the area up to the size of
Lockheed Electras, which can make things interesting on occasion.
Anytime you're mixing larger aircraft with smaller aircraft, it generally works quite well,
but you just got to be aware of the performance differences, the size of the aircraft,
wake turbulence, it brings in a new dynamic, and Flight Service, again,
are aware of that stuff, but they don't always have the ability to tell people,
"no," or "stop," or, you know,
"hold short," "remain clear of the zone," like, they can advise them to do that, but
again, it's up to the pilots to take that information and make their own decisions.
Buffalo and Air Spray generally are, especially Air Spray, are a more seasonal operation.
They generally start their training in March or April, provide flight training
for their pilots who are returning to provide fire suppression services across
not only Alberta but they do go into BC, and into Saskatchewan,
and to the Northwest Territories, pretty much anywhere they're contracted to go,
so they become a lot more of our workload than they usually are, beginning say,
mid to late March and lasting through about May, at which point then they generally go out to
wherever their contracts are, and they will stay on those contracted base sites until they return.
Though many airports around the world have seen huge drops in traffic with the lack
of passenger flights, Red Deer hasn’t actually had airline service since 2018.
For the past few years, this growth in flight training traffic has kept the movements up,
with the exception of this past spring when flight schools nationwide were temporarily shut down.
For that reason, Red Deer’s a unique case where Nav Canada
still sees a need for Air Traffic Control, despite…
well, 2020.
So we have been asked a few times, you know, with the decrease in traffic,
and with Covid and with... Like, everyone looks around, most airlines are grounded, traffic's down
everywhere, why are we still proceeding with this? And the reason we're still proceeding
with the conversion of Flight Service to Air Traffic Control is due to a number of things.
One of them is we've had commitments from the flight training units that operate here,
that they are committed to going back to their pre-Covid levels
with a plan to increase about forty percent from there, over the next...
Probably over the next two to three years so we should see traffic,
I would think probably touching around 100 to 110,000 mark by most likely into around 2022.
That level of traffic does not work well in an advisory capacity, you do need positive control,
and as i mentioned earlier, a lot of the pilots here are student pilots,
and student pilots as everyone knows, make student pilot mistakes.
It's not because they're foreign training pilots, it's not because of anything else,
it really boils down to, they're student pilots.
The conversion from FSS to ATC, while it's a great idea, it's a great conversion, and it's a great
plan going forward to bring in the appropriate level of service to manage the traffic,
it's not going to be the magic bullet that fixes all the student pilot training in the area.
Student pilots are learning to fly, they're going to continue to make student pilot mistakes,
the plan being with control service in the area, we do have now the ability to
tell people to do something versus give them information to let them make a decision,
because without a lot of knowledge, they don't have a lot of experience to draw
on to make those decisions, so often times they don't...
And this is not about all of them, but a lot of student pilots won't recognize that
something's not quite going to plan, so with an Air Traffic Control service in place now,
and the ability to provide that positive control, they can now say,
"no," "turn left," "turn right," "orbit hold outside the zone,"
they have a lot more options and how they provide traffic management in the Red Deer Airport.
Thank you so much to everyone at Nav Canada who helped out with this video,
and thanks very much for watching! Leave a like if you enjoyed, subscribe if you’re new,
and I’ll see you next time.