THUNDER BAY - After experiencing a half-decade of significant growth, traffic at the airport appears to have stabilized.
The Thunder Bay International Airport Authority held their annual general meeting Tuesday afternoon where they announced passenger volumes slightly declined for the second consecutive year.
In 2008 there were 645,000 passengers at the airport, a number which rose for five straight years before hitting its peak of nearly 780,000 in 2013.
Last year the airport reported more than 772,000 passengers, which represents about a one per cent drop over the past two years.
Airport president and chief executive officer Ed Schmidtke said factors beyond local control likely had an impact.
“We’re not immune from the national recession by any means,” he said. “Certainly the drops in commodity prices have affected demand for air travel in and out of Northwestern Ontario and the shuttling of employees back and forth from other locations like northern Alberta.”
However, Schmidtke anticipates 2016 will likely be a rebound year for the airport.
Between the existing 15 daily flights to Toronto as well as the addition of a new direct connection to Calgary that will come online later this summer, there are opportunities to keep the airport sustainable.
“We’re hoping for a lot of uptake on that (Calgary) flight,” Schmidtke said.
“We are very hopeful people are going to use this is as an opportunity to see western Canada or if they live in western Canada to come home for summer vacation. This has a lot to do with the soft economy in Alberta. There has been a lot of aircraft capacity that has been redistributed across the country and I can’t promise that will be here next year.”
Airport officials are hoping new strategies, such as actively marketing to northern Minnesota to try to entice travellers to fly through Thunder Bay to reach international destinations, will bring different passengers.
Other initiatives courted business, such as partnering with Goldcorp to shuttle employees to and from their Red Lake operations to move 23,400 fliers, about three per cent of the annual passenger total.
This year, the airport will be launching a $9 million rebuild of their crosswind runway as part of $13 million in capital spending. The runway provides system redundancy and access for airplanes that are vulnerable to crosswind while landing or taking off.
