YVR held an open house Wednesday October 12, 2016 to give the public another chance to provide feedback on the airport’s Master Plan and the airport’s future. As an avid plane spotter at YVR with an interest in all things aviation, I want to be involved with the ongoing conversations about plane spotting at YVR. So I made an effort to attend the event. For those of you who are interested you can find the complete master plan at http://www.yvr2037.ca
I was able to spend some time with a few of the YVR 2037 Master Plan project team members who were on hand to answer questions from the public; YVR CEO, Craig Richmond; Don Ehrenholz, Vice President, Engineering and Environment at YVR; Marion Town, Director of Environment at YVR; Christoph Rufenacht, Senior Engineer at YVR and Christopher Richards, Communications Specialist at YVR.
Some of the highlights of my time spent at the open house:
Speaking with CEO of YVR Craig Richmond and Marion Town, Director of Environment about the future of air travel and aircraft technology. Will there be private supersonic air travel in the future? Will there be a viable return of airships (or dirigibles) for cargo or passengers transport? Might there be a market for dirigibles that travel between North American and Europe to serve a market between fast airplane travel and slower cruise ships? We also reminisced about the fastest aircraft ever made, the SR-71 Blackbird. The SR-71 is a personal favorite of mine that I was lucky enough to see years ago at the Abbotsford Airshow. I also found out that Mr. Richmond has actually flown at or above Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) back in his Air Force days. Pretty cool.
Speaking with Senior Engineer Christoph Rufenacht about the ongoing RESA (Runway End Safety Area) project was interesting. I learned that most RES areas at YVR will be load bearing and not the non-load bearing type. So these load bearing RESA areas can be used for taxiing aircraft but are not considered runways that aircraft plan to normally use during landing. In the future there will be a need for an additional runway at YVR so we touched on some of the things you need to consider when thinking about adding a new runway at YVR such as busiest times of day, air traffic patterns, demands on air traffic control, environmental issues along with cost and other factors. We also chatted about projects the airport may undertake in the more distant future such as an elevated taxi way on the east side of the airport. It was a really interesting discussion.
I spoke with Don Ehrenholz, Vice President, Engineering and Environment about a variety of topics including some interesting things that could be happening with luggage handling in the airport. How cool would it be to be able to track your bag in real time from the time you drop it off to the time you pick it up at your destination. This is something that the airport is looking at for the not too distant future. We also chatted about the possibility of robotic luggage handlers at airports in the distant future. Some pretty cool stuff.
I also spoke with Chris Richards in some detail about possible future plane spotting locations in and around the airport. There seems to be 3 locations being considered for an additional dedicated plane spotting platform/area. All of them look pretty good to me and provide a nice selection of places to spot (and photograph) aircraft coming and going at the airport. The airport is looking at making the “dirt pile” on the north side of the airport a proper spotting location as well as 2 possible sites on the east end of the airport between the north and south runways. No firm decisions have been made as of yet but it is exciting to think about what the future holds in terms of plane spotting at YVR.
It was a very informative open house and I look forward to seeing how YVR evolves in the future.
Creativescans 