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Landing system decision hasn’t been made: NAV Canada |
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Written by Gerald Gauthier
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Tuesday, October 07 2008, 10:58 PM |
A recent flap over the prospect of Lethbridge County Airport being bypassed for replacement of its instrument landing system is premature, says a spokesman for the company providing air traffic control at the airport.
“No decisions have been made. These are preliminary discussions,” said NAV Canada spokesman Ron Singer, responding to concerns expressed last week by Lethbridge Mayor Bob Tarleck that decommissioning the ILS would render the Lethbridge airport unusable for commercial passenger jets.
“That’s wrong. They would still be able to fly into Lethbridge,” Singer said. “A jet doesn’t need an ILS to land.”
The existing ILS, which aids incoming aircraft in low-cloud conditions, is already well past its 15-year design life expectancy and is getting too costly to maintain, he said.
City council decided last week to send a letter to federal officials asking that the Lethbridge airport be included among nearly 40 airports for which new ILSs were recommended. The NAV Canada study determined accessibility to the Lethbridge airport would be reduced by less than 1.5 per cent if the 20-year-old, ground-based ILS was discontinued.
Singer estimated the cost of a new ILS at between $750,000 and $1 million.
A decision would be made, he said, only after all local stakeholders are consulted for their input. If the ILS is taken out of use, he said, it would likely be replaced with less-costly global positioning system technology that is becoming more common in the aviation industry.
“This is the way the aviation industry is moving,” he said.
An official with Lethbridge’s only commercial airline says, however, that because of current limitations of GPS technology, such a move could result in Lethbridge losing its status as the primary alternative for major airlines when they are unable to land in Calgary.
“It’s something airlines would look at. I think NAV Canada is kind of brushing that aside,” said Brent Gateman, co-owner of Integra Air. “There’ll be a lot fewer days where Lethbridge could be a viable alternative.”
Although he agreed the industry is moving toward aircraft-based GPSs, Gateman said the technology is still less precise — and therefore less safe — than ground-based ILSs.
“I think it would be a big loss if we lost (the ILS),” he said. “As a community and as an airport, we should be fighting for this.”
An ILS is a precision aviation application that pilots can use to as low as 200 feet from the ground, while GPS applications can be used to only as low as 350 feet from the ground.
NAV Canada is a privately operated company that provides air traffic control, flight information, weather briefings, aeronautical information, advisory services and electronic navigation aids to airports across Canada.
The company is collecting feedback on the issue from airlines until mid-October, Singer said, and expects to finish evaluating submissions by the end of November.
Excel Flight Training also operates out of the local airport but seldom uses the ILS because most training is done during fair weather conditions, said owner Roland Morton.
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Last Updated ( Monday, August 10 2009, 2:27 PM )
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