Buttonville is now the 8th busiest airport in Canada, up 14.6% from last year with 168,258 aircraft movements in 2007.
I have no explanation for the increase other than perhaps just an overall increase in the use of the airport by more students at Toronto Airways, the OPP and York Region Police utilizing the airport.
This is good news for an airport thats constantly under threat of being shutdown.
It’s the second busiest airport in Ontario, beating out Ottawa International.
The official report from Transport Canada can be found here.
It also could be the stretch of good dry weather in the summer of 2007.. Lots of VFR planes able to fly at that time.
The ratio of IFR/VFR (or roughly equivalent intinerant/local) is inportant. I dont have a lot of tower exposure, but I am pretty sure that they count one training circuit as 2 movements, overflights as 2 movements, etc. That is, they are pretty generous with the numbers when it comes to VFR’s. So when you have an airport like KZ, that has probably about 50% local, those numbers are likely to be more inflated, than an airport like OW, where I imagine its more like 25% local flights.
However, having said that, training flights can make an airport incredibly busy (as evidenced by KZ), and I agree that this is good news for the buttonville airport.
I don’t think there is a very realistic change that the airport will be shut down anytime soon.
Hi Joe,
A movement is considered to be a take-off or landing. So you’re right, one training circuit would be considered as 2 movements.
For YKZ 81,231 (48%) movements were itinerant while 87,027 were local.
For YOW 122,319 (74%) movements were itinerant while 43,449 where local.
The difference between to the two airports is small. YOW has 165,768 total movements while YKZ has 168,258 for a difference of 2,490 movements.
Training flights do make an airport busy. Especially on nice days like yesterday, where there were 6 in the circuit. I’ve seen it so busy that they’ve had to use their backup tower frequency and treating it as a departure/arrival freq (controlling people coming in and out of the zone).
Thanks for the comments!
So how do they work that? do they work like an inner and outer tower?
completely unrelated, but sometimes YYZ arrival runs three frequencies alone (and 2 departure frequencies) They run an inner and outer setup, with there being two outer frequencies sequencing the downwinds.
I’ve only personally experienced it once.
One controller handles traffic in the zone (not in the circuit) while another handles landing/take-offs and circuit traffic.