Nothing but clear skies flying during a pandemic
As air traffic slowly roars back, GTA pilots tell of some of recent odd experiences — and thrills
On April11, as Gord Roberts flew north of the city toward the Kitchener airport to practise an instrument approach, the voice of the air traffic controller at Pearson came in clearly over the radio in his Cessna-182.
“Do you want something special today?” the controller asked.
Roberts loves being up in the air, and normally he’s pretty busy as a volunteer pilot, transporting people from northern Ontario to cities like Toronto for medical treatments with the charity Hope Air. But when the pandemic hit, those flights were cancelled. And although there was nowhere to go in March and April, Roberts was still flying when he could, because he likes to keep his instrument skills sharp.
Flying by instrument is essential on cloudy days, in storms, any kind of bad weather, so he practises instrument approaches at different regional airports. Roberts would never attempt Pearson: if he asked air traffic control if he could try an approach at Canada’s busiest airport before the pandemic, he would politely be told it wasn’t possible, unless it was an emergency.
General aviation traffic — which includes smaller planes like Roberts — is typically diverted around Pearson, in routes north and south of the city, for the safety of everyone. And that’s where Roberts was, north of the city, on April11, when he was asked if he wanted to try something special. (He’s not usually asked that question.)
He was about 3,200 feet above the ground, heading west (4,000 feet above sea level). The winding suburban streets below were filled with parked cars that were normally at GO train parking lots,
tucked underneath office towers, or crawling along Highway 401.
As the pandemic deepened, the runways at Pearson, normally teeming with traffic, were just as quiet as the highway below. According to Nav Canada figures, by the end of March, traffic at the airport had plummeted to around 250 departures and arrivals a day versus the normal 1,200 flights a day for the same period in 2019. That pattern deepened in April and May, with daily flights dropping to around 180 a day. In June, daily flights averaged 250 a day, compared to an average of 1,300 a day for June 2019.
The controller asked if Roberts had the instructions for approaching Pearson with him. Roberts confirmed he had the digital file on board, and loaded it up to his screen for easy reading. He was told to make a left turn toward the airport, where he was cleared for an approach over runway 33-R. Using his instrument training, he descended to 200 feet above the runway before he climbed back into the sky. It was a novelty, a thrill.
When he mentioned it to his friends at the Buttonville Flying Club, they were all pretty amazed.
“The fact that I didn’t even ask for it and was offered to me,” Roberts says. A few of them even went over to Pearson to check it out themselves.
Jonathan Bagg, a spokesperson with Nav Canada, the not-for-profit company in charge of managing Canada’s airspace, says that in general, commercial jets and smaller aircraft aren’t mixed — the larger planes travel faster, and create wake turbulence, which is a safety concern for smaller aircraft. The job of an air traffic controller is to ensure that aircraft operate at a safe distance from each other.
While the airspace structure around Pearson has not changed, with fewer planes in the sky, “sometimes that gives you more flexibility in terms of how you keep aircraft safely distanced,” he says, confirming that there have been more requests from smaller planes to fly in the normally busy zone. If it’s quiet, air traffic controllers have more ability to grant that access, he says.
David Sprague, the president of the Buttonville Flying Club, says that flying in a small plane is often peaceful. It’s especially nice when the sky is clear and you can see the city, and watch the jets parade overhead as they go in and out of Pearson. Now, the parade is a very slow and sporadic one.
Sprague was flying above Buttonville on a Saturday in June to keep his hours current — and it was just after sunset. “There were only three airplanes within what looked like 10 miles — one was a police helicopter, one was a guy that coming from New Brunswick, and one was a guy coming from Muskoka.”
On a mid-July morning, at his home in Toronto, he looked at his tracking devices and saw five airplanes below 10,000 feet, and five above10,000 feet, within an 80-kilometre radius of the city. He estimated that it was about a third of the regular traffic, possibly lower.
Commercial and cargo traffic have been picking up, Gord Roberts says — but in the first months of the pandemic, “the controllers were basically sitting there bored and they were just so obliging,” Roberts said.
While airports like Pearson have felt the pandemic’s effects acutely, smaller airports saw big declines, too. “Initially our flying was down by about 75 per cent,” says Toronto Buttonville Municipal Airport vice-president Rob Seaman. “That’s slowly crept back up.”
The Markham-based airport serves all kinds of general aviation traffic, including police and media helicopters, medevac flights, flight training schools, corporate flights and recreational flyers who make short jaunts on the weekends. Nowadays, all occupants of landing planes are surveyed, people on board are given thermal scans. There are disinfections, masks, a check-in process on the street side and the air side, says Seaman, who hired two people for that purpose.
“We are doing everything we can to keep the bug out the door,” he says. “Initially, some people were grumpy about it, and some were non-believers, and now they’ve just resigned themselves to the fact that this is what they’re going to do.” The mandatory mask orders that some municipalities have enacted have also helped, but there are still people who grumble.
Mark Brooks is a flight instructor with Canadian Flyers based out of Buttonville Airport. Flight school was grounded until recently, but he does a lot of utility flights, and has been flying across the province and beyond fairly regularly, repositioning planes and doing maintenance checks.
The first few months of the pandemic were interesting, but rustic. Many airports had fuel, but no food, and no washrooms, he says, which meant packing a granola bar and “peeing behind the nearest bush.” As Ontario has slowly reopened, those amenities have been coming back.
With travel restrictions and border closures, the economic pain has spread widely. Buttonville tends to be a jumping-off point for young people going to other airline jobs, Seaman says, and he’s heard from a lot of former employees.
“Everyone who has left us in the last couple of years has come back knocking on the door saying, ‘Boss, can I have my job back,’ because they’re being told on the commercial airline side its going to be at least two years before the young hires who were at the end of the line get called back,” Seaman says. “It’s a mess.”
Nav Canada is funded by the fees it charges aircraft that fly through Canadian airspace.
The company’s president told the Star’s Bruce Campion-Smith that traffic and the subsequent revenue dropped by around 75 per cent in April. The company has fixed costs to control Canadian air traffic around the clock and with no government assistance forthcoming, they announced a 30 per cent fee hike this May to take effect in September.
“They make most of the revenue off the transatlantic routes,” Mark Brooks says. “Right now, they’re really hurting and like all of us they’re trying to try to figure out how to make it work.”
General aviation pilots have noticed the changes. When you fly anywhere in Canada, you typically speak with different controllers as you pass through different regions. When Gord Roberts flew from Oshawa to London recently, he spoke with one controller the entire way, where he would normally speak to three.
Nav Canada’s Jonathan Bagg says that combining positions is something they do at night when there is less traffic, but now they’re doing it more consistently.
The company’s “laser focus on safety” hasn’t changed, he says. “Our people are committed to getting the job done from a safety perspective, and that safety focus also applies to how we run the operation,” he says, noting that they’ve implemented a number of protocols to keep staff safe.
A forecast for the next five years of air travel from the International Air Transport Association estimates that average trip lengths will fall sharply, and that international air travel may not recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2023-2024. A July update showed that domestic air travel in regions like China and U.S. has increased slightly over pandemic lows, but border restrictions have not been widely relaxed for international travel.
Within the GTA, general aviation is picking up again. People who fly for recreation are making more weekend jaunts to regional airports, where some restaurant patios on site are open for an outdoor meal. Gord Roberts is back flying for Hope Air once again. Canadian Flyers, the flight school where Brooks teaches, has many students eager to take off, with a steady supply of masks and disinfectant.
On a recent flight to London, Ont., and Goderich, Brooks noticed more traffic in the air, and saw some bigger jets going toward Hamilton and Pearson. Barely a month ago, he said, he would have seen no one. Smaller utility airports like Buttonville and Oshawa, he says, are “roaring back to life.”
Brooks is glad to see a gradual and careful return for the industry’s sake, although he enjoyed the peaceful skies.