dowlingm
Senior Member
Not just Mirabel II - the Del Mastro ChooChoo too surely?
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Since it's a Federal project under Federal authority on lands entirely owned by the Federal government, there's not a lot the province or the municipality can do directly to stop planning and construction. But since the province/municipality control the roads, transit, water/wastewater hookups, etc they can give a hard time. I might expect the City of Pickering and Town of Ajax to resist and even the province to put up some resistance, but not Durham Region which of course controls a lot of those services.
An international airport in Pickering would cost tens of billions of dollars, and would create massive noise pollution problems similar to those in the western GTA near Pearson.
Pearson is well below maximum capacity anyway. If it were to get near maximum capacity, why not build high speed rail instead? HSR would cost a lot of money, but a new airport would cost a lot of money as well.
So is this new airport a full fledged secondary international airport (akin to Newark or LaGuardia in NYC) or is it a small airport that happens to accept international flights?
It seems very very unlikely to me that with Pearson having five runways (by comparison, Heathrow has TWO and twice the passengers) that another full-service airport will be remotely necessary in our lifetimes. That said, I could see the case for a sleep general aviation and cargo field to replace Buttonville.
Look at aircraft movements in peak hours though.
An A480 and a little 8 seater take nearly an equal amount of runway space.
Heathrow is blessed with both unusually large aircraft (smaller aircraft use other London airports) and a spread out load. Pearson experiences a rather dramatic morning and evening commuter period.
Folks lets calm down a bit here. From what I have researched construction will begin around 2027 and it will initially be a GA airport to replace Buttonville. It will eventually expand to full commercial airline service when needed. So I think we are looking at approx 2045 before we can even begin to expect to see 737's 380's etc landing at Pickering...
That was part of the problem with Mirabel. The Province failed to build any decent access roads so the already long trip there from downtown took a very long time.
+ 1
I hate when people bring up the 2 runway argument ... it comes down to this exactly ! In Europe in general, the aircraft used are much larger on the whole.
Just compare the fleets of various airlines !
Uggh. Aircraft movements are not a linear calculation.
They are very much influenced by local factors: local winds, traffic mix, runway conditions, etc.
It's quite misleading to compare Pearson to Heathrow.