Tick, tock; time’s a ticking.

I’m feeling a little bit of time pressure that, for once, has very little to do with my own impossible demands.

My local airport has always been a bit of a hot potato politically. A lot of people for various reasons really don’t like it and would be much happier if it conveniently disappeared. You know the usual NIMBY brigade. They cite the usual noise and environmental concerns, but the reality is that the planes are no noisier than the traffic on the highway or the party boats in the summer. The airport has been there since the 30s. If you don’t like aeroplanes, don’t live next to an airport.

Another political aspect to this has been the rapid growth of Porter airlines. For a long time they were the only airline that ran flights out of there. Again the politics behind slot allocation is complex and tedious. Let’s just say that neither Porter nor Air Canada got what they wanted.

What I can say with a degree of certainty is that both airlines would rather that us General Aviation planes were not there. We are a major annoyance and in fact it has long been suspected that Porter have been doing their level best to evict as much General Aviation as possible.

Therefore this news article doesn’t come as a shock to me at all. The flight school that RTH started his training at was forced to move to another airfield when their rent was jacked up by 300%. This left RTH in an awkward position. He drives but we don’t have a car, he had no real way to get anywhere other than CYTZ, that we can walk to.

As an aside here, I just want to show you what a good sport Bob is, realising that he had a couple of students in the middle of training and not willing to abandon them. He simply got himself signed up as an instructor at the last remaining flight school on the island and carried on from there. It sounds simple when you write it like that but I suspect it was anything but.  I have no idea if Bob planned on continuing instructing once he’d gotten his old students through their test. He instructs part time, on top of a pretty demanding regular job, but then he inherited me and seems to have a handful of new students now, so who knows? RTH and I are just very grateful!

So this is my concern, with all the wrangling over the possibility of jets being allowed in and the runway extension that would require. I don’t see much future for us little guys at CYTZ. I feel the clock ticking. If my flight school closes, I have nowhere to go.

Although I don’t see anything changing in the immediate future, I honestly don’t know how long that “immediate future” might be. Truthfully I’m addicted to this; it is blatantly obvious that for me this is more than about learning how to control a plane. I need this and the thought of it been taken away from me is just to cruel to contemplate.