Hangar starts new life as teaching facility
NAIT using old Alberta government airplane centre to train mechanics
A hangar that once kept sleek aircraft to jet around Alberta politicians and their entourages now has a more proletarian purpose — housing bulldozers and excavators to train heavy equipment mechanics for industry.
The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology acquired the hangar at the neighbouring former City Centre Airport from the Government of Alberta, and officially unveiled the 30,000-square-foot building Friday as a new centre for its heavy equipment technology program.
The building will alleviate a shortage of space in the perennially oversubscribed program and allow NAIT to expand heavy equipment education by as much as 60 per cent.
“This is my seventh year as program chair and the last few years, we’ve been training at peak capacity just over a thousand apprentices alongside our full-time diploma students and the program’s been oversubscribed with wait lists on both of the programs,” said Colin Ruthven, Program Chair, Heavy Equipment Technician Programs at NAIT.
“Now we’ve got the ability to increase our enrolment capacity by 60 per cent. This year, we’ve seen a 40-per-cent increase with close to 1,400 this year.”
Heavy equipment technicians maintain, repair and overhaul vehicles and equipment to keep the construction, mining, forestry, agriculture, material handling, landscaping and transportation industries moving.
“The facilities we had were some of the original facilities when NAIT was first built, so obviously there was room for improvement,” said Derek Lastiwka, who graduated in 2014 and now works for Wajax Equipment.
“The big improvement is the space and the equipment.”
Alberta Education Minister David Eggen alluded to the building ’s past.
“The provincial government had more to do with this building than you might imagine,” Eggen said. “This was where the government airplanes were coming from. I think this is a much better use of that resource, although I do think longingly sometimes as I’m driving on the ground around Alberta about those same planes.”
The province sold the last of its controversial airplane fleet in January.
Alberta had operated an air fleet since the 1970s, but the aircraft were common targets for critics who said the former Progressive Conservative government misused the planes for partisan purposes.
The planes again drew controversy in recent years following a special report from Alberta auditor general Merwan Saher that found former premier Alison Redford misused the planes for personal benefit, sometimes booking blocks of fake passengers on flights to ensure she could travel alone with her closest aides.
Saher’s audit concluded the government could save $4 million annually by using commercial, charter and ground transportation instead.