Penticton Regional Airport customers receive an early Christmas gift

Hopefully there won’t be any need for Rudolph’s nose at Penticton Airport this Christmas season as new navigational procedures are now in place that should see a return to more reliable commercial scheduling at the airport.

Nav Canada Media relations manager Brian Boudreau says a new air flight landing and departure procedure for the airport has been implemented with the promise of eliminating many of the schedule interruptions that have plagued the airport's two commercial carriers since September.

A notice to airmen (NOTAM) was issued by the Department of Transport for Penticton Regional Airport in August of this year after an audit of the airport made note of Greenwood Forest Product’s exhaust stack height, located near the north end of the runway.

A temporary solution which effectively shortened the useable length of the runway by 500 feet caused scheduling havoc over the past three months when numerous flights were forced to return to their origin due to impacts on navigational aids affecting night time and poor visibility landings.

Boudreau said today a new procedure to improve airport accessibility in reduced visibility conditions and during night time flights was implemented Thursday, Dec. 5.

“Those were the two areas where delays were occurring due to the runway shortening. This procedure should improve those conditions and make for greater flight schedule reliability,” he said.

Boudreau said Nav Canada had been working with the airport authority to design and validate the new procedure, with original plans to initiate the new protocols in January or February next year.

“We put in some hard work with the aeronautical information management team at Nav Canada to design and validate a new flight procedure, which was ready to implement Dec. 5,” Boudreau said.

The new rules are timely indeed, as Penticton Regional Airport prepares for the holiday travel season and a time of the year when weather conditions are generally anything but reliable.

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