Planning Canada’s Electric Flight Future

By Mark Brooks Authorities have drawn up a programme for the introduction of electric aircraft. It will be part of a national net zero carbon footprint transport plan to be published in spring 2022 and put to the country’s parliament. It starts with a few airports and a locally built 19-seat electric aircraft. By 2040, […]

Did A Government MP give lobbyists a sneak peek at a confidential report?

By Mark Brooks Did Jennifer O’Connell, Member of Parliament for Pickering—Uxbridge, or someone on her staff, give lobbyists and other interested parties a sneak peek at a then-confidential Transport Canada report? The million-dollar consultant’s report, called the Pickering Lands Aviation Sector Analysis (ASA for short), suggests breaking ground on the new airport in 2026, building in stages from […]

Unleashing a Golden Age of Canadian GA

  By Mark Brooks Aviation’s first Golden Age is commonly accepted to have lasted for several decades beginning with Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight in June, 1927. It was a period of record-breaking flights, air races, the first commercially-viable airliners and major advances in aviation technology. These advances changed the world with improved commercial links and […]

Proposed Markham Development Ignores the Future Pickering Airport?

By Ted Nickerson There have been articles recently in the Toronto Star (February 18 and 26, 2021) reporting on a residential development proposal for north Markham.  The City of Markham had asked the province to issue a Minister’s Zoning Order (MZO) to permit the development to proceed, while residents strongly oppose the development. Markham MZO […]

Aviation’s Two Paths To A Net-Zero Carbon Future

  By Mark Brooks Our planet is on fire and the status quo just doesn’t cut it. Although aviation produces only 2.5% of global carbon emissions, its role as the lynchpin of the global economy has made it a symbol of a net-zero carbon future. Two starkly different visions of that future present opposing paths […]

Critique of the Land Over Landings Research Paper 11 – Indoor Farming and North Pickering

By Ted Nickerson Released in October 2020 by Land Over Landings (LOL), a document titled Research Paper 11 focuses on rebutting comments by local politicians regarding the potential for greenhouses and vertical farming on the federal Pickering Airport Lands.  The comments by local elected officials were made in the context of including agriculture as part […]

A New Green Aerotropolis Takes Shape Near Toronto

by Mark Brooks Have you heard about the Eastern Toronto Regions new Aerotropolis? It will create 150,000 jobs, homes for 120,000 people and enable our net zero carbon emissions goals.  The project has been decades in the making and will take years to finish.  It has the support of five local city government’s and the […]

Time to kill the Contrail Multiplier Zombie

It is time for a zombie hunt. A dead science hypothesis from 1999 — that contrails multiply carbon emission — lives on. This living dead story is haunting newspaper articles and social media sites with a strange idea that a contrail caused by a jet flying above 25,000 feet has three times the effect on […]