"which means, fly the aircraft into Prince George and take the goods off and truck it through North America."

I dont know much about the logistics of such a plan and it may just be a pipe dream, but if it could come true it could be a boom for the local economy.

When it comes to trucking, you want to be at the starting terminal, no the destination. A great many local companies would think they have died and gone to heaven. Anybody in the repair and maintenance business would benefit greatly.

WTG PG Airport. I can hardly wait till it is successful, so all those naysayers can eat crow.

This is our next economic Engine. We have the opportunity to be catapulted. Cautious we need to be, we can be the golden child one day, and Caine the next. Let them invest in our Logistic Park, Sign them a sweet heart of a deal. Get the traffic rolling. The land is cheap, the developers will make their money in the smaller businesses trying to service the big ones.

The additional airport projects will cost between $15 million and $25 million and add that to the $36-million runway extension and refueling apron and we still don't have anyone who wants to use it...

the Russians parked here only because there was no place for them , so Vancouver said, to park there...

and a 747 landed here,and I still think they were paid to do so...as a photo ops..

wow that is a lot of use of our wee airport...
17.5 million per airplane now there is money spent...
now they want to build this cargo warehousing.....
may be great if our hick town airport was being used....but NEWS FLASH...is isn't...

Well I guess there is one good point to all this....the use of our airport is up 200 % with those two planes using it...

It is a very nice dream but I for one am not going to hold my breath waiting for magic to happen...

One has to wonder how Anchorage got its start.

One also has to wonder if any community anywhere in the world is going to start anything new given that we have everything everywhere already.

It is a wonder this city ever got started in the first place.

Well you can say one thing about the airport expansion naysayers... so far they've been right.

I am still amazed how much money has been spent on this without not having anyone signed up or not really knowing where the customers are coming from in the first place, just on 'a hope' that things will work out.

That's waht it looks like from my perspective. Maybe there's a lot going on in the background that the average person doesn't see. Hopefully my perspective isn't the reality here.

I do want this to ultimately succeed, I just haven't seen how it's going to work.

How many restaurants open up without customers signed up?

How many hotels open up without customers signed up?

How many service stations open up without customers signed up?

How many airlines start up without customers signed up?

A study was done. Reliable or not, who knows. Such consultants never come with guarantees, but they did presumably report that an aircargo facility in PG was viable.

When I read the comment about fuel storage, however, I do start to wonder how we got this far without understanding the way fuel is accessed by airlines. What else are we missing on the operations side?

True gus, but all of those examples do not use millions of taxpayer dollars to start themselves up.

"A study was done. Reliable or not, who knows."

That's the scary part. I know that Calgary looked into the aircargo business and decided it wasn't viable. What justification did the PG study use?

Thank you Gus, to get Mr.PG on the yay sayer side. Airplanes run more efficiently in colder temperatures, thus they would rather fly northwards when heading east or west. Thus a plane leaving Asia, are going to fly over international airspace anyway, they choose to land in Anchorage to refuel. They would rather fly likely a bit shallower northwards, but where is an uncongested airport.

That is why the PGAA looked good, we are in a northern route between Asia and Chicago, we have an underused runway. We have a inland port, with rails heading all directions. We have roadways to match. We even have a refinery that can make the diesel for the jets.

The cat and mouse game that is likely being played out is, which airline is going to tell Anchorage first that they are going to use PG. Anchorage is dropping their rates, to see if they can starve us out.

my thoughts, let the airlines build their own storage tanks, and they can administer their own refueling. The larger their investment, the more committed they will be to our air cargoport.

problem with Calgary, its a bit too southward and a busy airport.

Yes, Gus it was a bit naive of the PGAA to have the oversight that the airlines like to operate out of a storage tank. However, them owning their own storage tanks, is not all a bad thing. We should not own it, they should pay for the construction cost of it.

the rustads sawmill site is excellent for cargo storgage,i heard in the past the airport was looking into it

The airport got caught up in the drop in the world wide economy. Air frieght dropped like a stone but has been recovering.

Aircraft like jets fly high not because of lower temperature, but for thinner air which makes for less are resistance for higher speeds and burning less fuel.

When flying to europe or asia for example the shortest route is polar or the great circle route. Have a look on a globe.

I still think this is a positive development for PG... like I said before I feel it will be a ten year plan before we start to see any real benefits, but it does have the potential to become an anchor of PG's economy in the near future. Public investment in infrastructure is the only way to get something like this off the ground... I'd much rather see the investment in free enterprise infrastructure, than more public sector compensation packages.

My biggest complaint is that I think the runway expansion should have been paid 100% federally as essential infrastructure for national defense and natural disasters in this part of the country. We spend billions in the East for national defense and hardly a dime here in this part of the country... and its our tax dollars for the most part. Sand bagging the local airport with the cost of the expansion was uncalled for IMO... failure of federal leadership and representation even if they cost shared the runway expansion.

Eagleone, The Feds don't spend that much money out west, because the votes from the west don't matter that much. We are just being milked, that is what we are here for. I am all for, BC, Alberta, Sask, Yukon, NWT, Nunavit to have a interim government level to fight the feds, Ok, if we need to take Manitoba to make it work, than we will take her as our ugly sister.

BCRacer,

You have to ask yourself, what is more likely to succeed: 1) will build to suit or 2) build it an they will come.

No one is going to give a hard commitment to move their operations somewhere until they can "kick the tires". Any contract we actually got before we had the runway, the apron and now the storage would have so many ways for the airlines to get out that it wouldn't be worth what it cost to draw it up.

I say lets take a shot and see where it gets us.

Don't you guys realize that mill workers, loggers, taxi cab drivers, real estate agents and armchair pundits know more about these types of operations than the people that actually run them?

We realize that.

That is why operations such as airports, colleges. universities, cities, etc have boards made up of those kind of people you describe that know nothing of the operations they direct or hiring CEOs to operate them ........ ;-)

hang on, I don`t begin to think that anyone on this site knows anything. If they did, they would keep their opinions to themselves and charge for it.