(Image Credit: Curtis Goodrum / CFJC Today)

By Curtis Goodrum & Victor Kaisar

YKA FLIGHTS

Kamloops Councillor reiterates need for pilot training as YKA reports slower 2025

Jan 14, 2026 | 5:57 PM

KAMLOOPS — A Kamloops Councillor is reiterating his call for the provincial and federal governments to help train new pilots following a slight downturn in the number of passengers who made their way through Fulton Field last year.

Bill Sarai, who is also the president of the Kamloops Airport Authority Society, believes more pilots are needed to help airlines bring more people to smaller airports like Kamloops.

“We’re a regional airport and we rely on the students that come out of flight schools,” Sarai said. “It’s their entry-level jobs for the smaller aircraft. What we’re finding is that this is one of the industries that since COVID has never 100 per cent rebounded to capacity.”

“It’s short in every staffing level from cleaners of the aircraft, maintenance crews, ground level ticket agents and pilots and across the world.”

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Sarai was speaking days after Kamloops Airport released its year-end numbers for 2025, which revealed a total of 293,840 passengers made their way through Fulton Field, a five per cent drop from the 310,507 passengers seen across 2024.

While 2025 ended strong, airport management say those lower passenger numbers are due to a variety of factors – including economic uncertainty – that affected people’s travel plans.

“We saw fewer international students entering our doors and their associated families,” YKA Managing Director Jim Moroz said. “I think the main one was frequencies to our main destinations, Vancouver and Calgary which were reduced for the first three quarters of the year.”

“We saw those frequencies return in the fourth quarter, and the numbers adjusted quite quickly after they returned.”

Moroz said the hope is that the swell in passenger numbers in the final three months of 2025 will carry over into 2026.

“We’re optimistic for 2026. We’re going to build on the end of Q4 for 2025 and continue to seek out more frequencies and destinations where the market is driving,” Moroz added.

Sarai wants the provincial and federal governments to bring in a number of measures to make it easier for people to get access to pilot training programs.

Those include asking the B.C. government to recognize flight training as an eligible program under provincial financial aid systems as well as for the federal government to develop or extend financial assistance programs — like loans and grants — to flight training programs.

He’s also hoping to see a partnership established between the two flight schools in Kamloops and Thompson Rivers University, whereby a degree or diploma program is established to train new pilots, noting there are partnerships of this kind in other provinces like Alberta.

“I’m hoping that the provincial government here in B.C. could treat pilot training as a trade school or academic program, where they can get a student loan to help them pay for the cost of flight training, because it could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Sarai said.

“It is a vital trade that we are lacking in Canada.”