Pickering Airport is One Step Closer to Reality
By: David Sprague, President Buttonville Flying Club
April 22, 2023
Toronto: Recently, members of the Buttonville Flying Club attended a series of publicly held municipal planning meetings. On behalf of the 200 plus members of the Buttonville Flying Club, part of the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association, I would like to thank the competent and organized elected officials and staff of Durham Region for recognizing the importance of aviation. The Region’s recently released draft Official Plan is the culmination of years of work completed through the Envision Durham process, the Municipal Comprehensive Review of Durham’s existing strategic growth plan.
The plan includes input from individuals, planning experts, businesses and not-for-profit organizations such as our flying club. It will replace a planning document released 30 years ago. A lot has changed in 30 years, including the growing importance of aviation to our economy. The new logistics hub and airport planned in North Pickering cannot come a moment too soon.
With Covid behind us, the capacity crunch at our major commercial airports, especially Toronto Pearson International Airport (CYYZ), are well known. What is less well known, is the dire situation developing in Southern Ontario for General and Business Aviation. Airports that traditionally serve GA and BA have limited ability to accommodate additional growth. Space at Toronto Buttonville Municipal Airport (CYKZ), historically on of Ontario’s busiest airports, is at a premium. The Oshawa Executive Airport (CYOO) is already trying to evict a flight school to reduce daily flight numbers.
The new airport in Pickering will remedy both the BA and GA capacity issues, enhance safety, provide badly needed new industrial space and provide the capacity for future passenger flights.
For more than a decade the Buttonville Flying Club’s members have been volunteering their aviation expertise in support of a new airport on land set aside in Pickering.  Since 2017, our club members have created a framework to discuss the need for the new airport, which can be found at www.PickeringAirport.org. This includes more than 130 well researched and written articles about the need and role of the new airport.
The Buttonville Flying Club’s volunteers look forward to continuing to support our community with educational efforts on the role of aviation in Canada’s modern industrial economy and the value of local accessible aviation. Working together we can help foster the appropriate conditions for a prosperous Net Zero emissions future in which the new airport in Pickering is the lynch pin of our connection to the global economy.
Great.. when is the next meeting. I would like to join. Spent many years in that place.
All good pilots understand they are engaged in a mathematical process.. time to learn some advanced aviation math. Actually it’s economics 101.
Met Ted N yesterday. The engineer.. he said he has copies of the gtaa 2008 master plan. ….But had never checked their capacity math equations on page 5-11.
Poor form.
We provided you the graph and the equations Mark.
Time to become a real instructor.
Fish or cut bait.
Pickering is toast.
You had Mary crying.. not nice.
Despite you previous posts, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and take you seriously. So in order
– The GTAA master plan numbers are correct, yours are not. I trust the engineers and professionals who work at the GTAA and transport Canada.
– The flying club is technical and social, not a political organization, if you join you will need to check your politics at the door along with the conspiracy theories. If you can do that, understand the rules of the club concerning be respectful to other pilots, and support our focus on safety, then you are welcome. Tall stories of how it use to be when you were flying might be useful and entertaining. After all, the older we all get, the better we were!
– If you wish to start flying again after a 10 year break you will need to do some serious work. You can start by writing the PSTAR. As an instructor my schedule is full at Canadian flyers but perhaps one of the other instructors might be intrigued by the challenge.
I hate it break it to you. The mullahs in the fundamentalist Western cult of climate change have decreeed that not only new airports must not happen, the existing ones must close. One such 30-page decree says all airports in the UK except 3 must close by 2050. The Canadian one is in the works. Of course the decree is invalid in China which apparently has a separate climate system and where the science is different. China is adding 10 new mega airports each year to 2050. The future of aviation is in China.
given the discrepancy now between the region and the city of Pickering, would the region go back to the drawing board to reassess their new draft plan? This discrepancy is surprising since 3 of the city councilors also sit on the region council and all these 3 voted to oppose the airport.
The cities motion will not have any immediate effect unless it spends time and money fighting the region and federal government. But it could scare away investors over the long term. Otherwise, the city voted itself out of the airport conversation, restricting staff’s ability to answer questions and represent the cities interests on the airport issues and opportunities. With a final study underway it means the city will not have a voice when it counts. It also means there will be no technical staff expertise to counter misinformation.
We focus on facts, promoting the need for new aviation infrastructure and the transition to net zero aviation. We will continue to ask the hard questions, the ones that gets those using misinformation for political, lifestyle and $$ gain so upset. The city staff will no longer have the ability to spend the time and money to defend the city, or explore it’s amazing aviation opportunity. So, citizens like you and me need to step it up and hold the cities anti-airport critics and our elected officials to account.