Brocklehurst resident wants non-essential air traffic diverted around neighbourhood

“Maybe within a month I was in my home and I saw and heard some five or six different smaller aircrafts circling the neighbourhood,” she said, “and I didn’t know what this was all about, so I contacted the airport and I asked them for an explanation, letting them know I was new, and I wasn’t anticipating that type of air traffic over the residential areas.”

The planes that Dodds had spotted were training aircraft belonging to the Canadian Flight Centre.

The students were practicing what’s called a ‘touch and go’ circuit. She was told there was little that could be done about the flight path of the planes.

“Perhaps two weeks later I was on the Rivers Trail and I noticed two operators were doing the same evolutions that I was explained were touch-and-goes, yet they were never entering the Brocklehurst airspace,” Dodds said.

Canadian Flight Centre Owner Peter Schlieck says the flight path is not up to the pilots-in-training or the school.

“For every airport in Canada there are precise instructions how to fly the circuit,” he said. “For Kamloops that means Transport Canada in their wisdom has decided all the circuit work for this long runway that’s mostly used here has to be to the north.”

For Dodds, safety concerns have mounted following the tragic crash of a Snowbirds aircraft in May.

“If this individual could not get that aircraft back to safety,” she said, “if that individual was unable to do it, how the heck can we expect an untrained, unskilled, unlicensed pilot that doesn’t have the reaction time that a Snowbird pilot would have? And that’s when it occurred to me — there is an issue here.”

Schlieck says the training school has never had an injury in more than 40 years of operation and points out the planes used by the school are very different from those used by the Snowbirds.

“These are jets. If they don’t have an engine that drives them forward, they become paper weights,” he said. “These become gliders. So, if we have an engine failure, we practice it, we go out, we take off and at a certain height we pull the engine and the student has to now learn to find a way.”

That particular training is not done over a residential neighbourhood.

Schlieck says if the school could change its path for practicing takeoff and landing, it would.

“We could get some exemptions for a few days a few weeks ago and that gave the whole area relief, but now we are back to our old pattern because they don’t want to give us this relief, extensively.”

CFJC Today reached out to NAV Canada, but a spokesperson was not available by our deadline.

by Jill Sperling

Brocklehurst resident wants non-essential air traffic diverted around neighbourhood

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