Aviation View Magazine | Volume 1, Issue 4

79 AVIATION VIEW VOLUME 1, ISSUE 4 PR INCE GEORGE INTERNAT IONAL A I RPORT Army on route to Alaska. This traffic increased in the years building up to World War II and the airport was moved to allow for growth. In 1940, Canada’s Department of National Defense decided to build a brand-new, third-generation Prince George Airport as part of the Northwest Staging Route, which both the U.S. and Canada developed to provide protection, to permit aircraft to be deployed rapidly to northwestern Canada and Alaska in time of emergency, and allow easy transportation of personnel and supplies. When the war ended in 1946 the airport was turned over to the Department of Transport by the RCAF and the USAAF. Today, Prince George International sees commercial airline services from Air Canada Express, WestJet, Pacific Coastal Airways, Air North and Central Mountain Air. KF Cargo and SkyLink Express both offer cargo services to Kamloops and Vancouver. The airport has a robust array of services that includes Guardian Aerospace (a flight training facility that also canoeing, kayaking, and spectacular hikes.” Duke has spent a tumultuous two years in his executive role at Prince George International Airport. It was mere months after he arrived on the job that COVID-19 came on the scene and traffic numbers dropped quickly. He reports, “By the end of 2019, we were seeing around half a million passengers having gone through the airport. In 2020 we only had 176,000 passengers. The bottom fell out of it. Luckily, Prince George having a resource-based economy also provides a lot of essential travel and workplace transfers. For example, we have the Northern Health Authority based here, which provides quite a bit of travel as part of the health service delivery plan – moving specialists and other medical folks up from Vancouver for a period. The University Hospital of Northern BC is located in Prince George, which again drives a certain amount of aviation traffic. We’ve been able to maintain better traffic numbers after that initial collapse and we are back up to around 65 percent of our previous passenger numbers. Revenue numbers remain similarly low and we are looking at innovative ways to regain revenue streams.” The airport itself is about six miles outside the City of Prince George and sits on just over 2,000 acres of land. It has a staff of 40 employees in the winter and 32 during the other seasons – distributed between administration, front line, and services. Prince George International has three asphalt runways, one with a length of 3,769 feet, the next at 5,624, and the longest at 11,450. It can therefore handle any modern airplane and, along with a modern terminal and staffed control tower, features all the infrastructure of any city airport. This is partly due to its key location serving the north, but also somewhat due to its strategic military history. The first airport opened in Prince George in 1920 and served as a stopover for aircraft, including those of the United States