Daytime commercial flights to and from Kelowna International Airport have been cancelled for the better part of a week. This is how it looked during the COVID shutdown in 2020.

Image Credit: Submitted/City of Kelowna

Wildfires are common in the Okanagan every summer but they don’t force the closure of the country’s tenth largest airport.

That changed this year after the McDougall Creek Wildfire broke out near West Kelowna last week and the airport closed on Friday, Aug. 18. But that fire had nothing, directly, to do with the closure.

“If it had stayed there (West Kelowna) we would have been in good shape,” airport director Sam Samaddar told iNFOnews.ca. The airport would not have had to close.

It’s the fact that the fire jumped the lake and started new fires in Kelowna and Lake Country that forced the closure.

“The problem with this fire is that it’s been, basically, right in our backyard,” Samaddar said.

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Part of the reason for the closure was the fact that helicopters were scooping up buckets of water from Wood and Duck lakes to fight the fires on the east side of the lake.

That’s directly in the airport’s flight path.

But strict federal rules also played a major role.

“There are Canadian aviation regulations that say, if you have a fire within five nautical miles of the airport, you must shut it down,” Samaddar said.

That boundary runs from the Bennett Bridge north along the ridge to the west of the airport as far north as Fintry.

Because forestry aircraft had to use that airspace, commercial flights could only use the airport at night when the forestry craft were not flying.

The forestry aircraft didn’t use Kelowna Airport for refuelling since the helicopters refuel in the field and water bombers are based out of Kamloops or Penticton.

Now that the two fires on the east side of Okanagan Lake are being held, BC Wildfires has reduced its airspace requirements - including not taking water from Wood and Duck lakes - so more commercial flights are possible.

But the airspace borders are still being tweaked between forestry and Nav Canada.

A further complication is that only visual flying rules are currently in place so commercial flights may have to be cancelled if smoke moves back in.

Some Westjet and other flights will start after 10 a.m. today and increase to a full schedule by Saturday. By that time, Samaddar hopes to have instrument flying back as well.

Westjet also needs to have ground crews in place 24 hours in advance of their flights, which is why its daytime routes can’t start until 10 a.m.

Samaddar advices travellers to check with their airlines first to determine what flights will be available.

“We have one of the most complex airspaces in all of Canada,” Samaddar said. “The reason for that is, one, the geography we have around the airport. Two, we have really complex traffic from general aviation to corporate jets to commercial aircraft and cargo airplanes and, of course they all operate at different speeds. Then we have the weather that goes along with that.”

But, in the past, they’ve been able to find ways to work around the fires.

Two years ago, the White Rock Lake Wildfire, just to the north of the McDougall Creek fire, was in an area where aircraft normally flew to descend into the airport. That meant having to modify flight plans to allow them to come in safely.

“This is not the first fire we’ve had (fire) in close proximity to the airport but we’re the largest airport in the country that has these interface fire pieces that it has to consider as part of its operations,” Samaddar said.

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