News   Apr 03, 2020
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Calgary International Airport

From the article...

the Canada Infrastructure Bank is committing $172 million, providing co-financing to the authority for several projects, including this development.

From earlier in the article...

The Calgary Airport Authority will build and own the new 150,000-square-foot engine maintenance and test facility on its land, expected to cost about $120 million.

That's 52 million that the authority has to do other things, like a central security area. So maybe it is happening.
 
Interesting that YYC will build and own the facility and just lease it out to Lufthansa Technik on a long-term lease.

Noticed this key information in the article:
Additionally, the Canada Infrastructure Bank is committing $172 million, providing co-financing to the authority for several projects, including this development.
Given this facility will cost about $120 million, that leaves another $50 million for other projects. I wonder if that's from the past funding for the West runway rehabilitation that's ongoing, or for something else new like the single domestic security discussed earlier in the thread.

It's great to see the industry growing in this city though!
 
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Domestic, saw a drop of 0.75%. Not overly surprising as every other international airport in Canada saw weak domestic numbers.
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Transborder saw a healthy increase of 7.73%
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International up 10%
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Another tidbit of information from this CTV article:
WestJet sees 25 per cent drop in passengers wanting to fly to U.S. since tariff talk started: CEO
The Calgary Airport Authority is overseeing the planning and development of the new repair facility. The authority’s president and CEO said the facility will cost about $120 million dollars and is the first of four projects to be announced, which are set to total $300 million.

So sounds like there are 3 more projects the airport plans to announce soon.

Also, I'm guessing from the article, that if this tariff/annexation threat continues, transborder passenger numbers could drop significantly, unlikely we see another record year this year if that trend continues IMO.
 
Another tidbit of information from this CTV article:
WestJet sees 25 per cent drop in passengers wanting to fly to U.S. since tariff talk started: CEO


So sounds like there are 3 more projects the airport plans to announce soon.

Also, I'm guessing from the article, that if this tariff/annexation threat continues, transborder passenger numbers could drop significantly, unlikely we see another record year this year if that trend continues IMO.
Probably likely if the tariff threat continues, unfortunately. I imagine it would impact all 4 of Canada's big airports considerably.

On the bright side, if WestJet finds itself reducing flights to some US destinations, perhaps it'll open up opportunities for more international routes?
 
Another tidbit of information from this CTV article:
WestJet sees 25 per cent drop in passengers wanting to fly to U.S. since tariff talk started: CEO


So sounds like there are 3 more projects the airport plans to announce soon.

Also, I'm guessing from the article, that if this tariff/annexation threat continues, transborder passenger numbers could drop significantly, unlikely we see another record year this year if that trend continues IMO.
I thought the airport had a lot of debt... Another 180M in projects to come is interesting.

On the bright side, if WestJet finds itself reducing flights to some US destinations, perhaps it'll open up opportunities for more international routes?
There is always this, personally I don't fly to the states so more international routes sounds great.
 
Debt isn't a bad thing as long as you have the revenue stream on the other side.
True, I assume these coming investments maybe are not the sexy things but things on the logistics side like this announcement. I mean does the airport have to put anything towards the airport rail line? Maybe the 180 is for the rail line stop at the airport?
 
I mean does the airport have to put anything towards the airport rail line?
I heard yes, but that was a number of years ago. $100 from the airport, $100 from Transport Canada. Which is partly offsetting the difficulty of an entity building and borrowing for something on federal land.
 
I heard yes, but that was a number of years ago. $100 from the airport, $100 from Transport Canada. Which is partly offsetting the difficulty of an entity building and borrowing for something on federal land.
Should get a full report on the airport rail soon (end of Q1 is what the city website says). Only money mentioned in the briefing was the money for the study.
 
Should get a full report on the airport rail soon (end of Q1 is what the city website says). Only money mentioned in the briefing was the money for the study.
Until the thing is final, no further commitments. The province is the one dragging. In 2021 they proposed to switch the entire financing model on its head, by requiring the asset transfer to public ownership at the end of the project term. So instead of the planning and financing going simultaneous, they started making excuses of one for delay on the other. But yes, finally moving.
 
I haven't updated these in a while; here's the monthly pax numbers versus a pre-covid trend projection including seasonality and linear growth:
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International has been the big success, with a lot more summer traffic than the prepandemic trend - more even travel year-round; on the other hand, domestic and transborder are still below the pre-pandemic trend. I suspect this drop is just a long-term effect of Teams, Zoom and the rest normalizing more business being done virtually. This is what it's going to be now.

Based on these recent trends, my guess for 2025 is 13.22M domestic, 3.97M transborder and 2.46M international for a total of 19.65M pax.

However, my guess is that we'll likely underachieve this target. I suspect transborder will have a hit from the nonsense down there; I've had three conversations in the past two weeks where different people have talked about reluctance to travel to the US. In principle that means domestic might benefit as people in other provinces come here for holidays; in practice economic uncertainty leads to less spending on nice things like luxury travel. Internationally, who knows -- on one hand, maybe Banff seems like a less-crazy alternative to Yellowstone; on the other hand, I suspect some international visitors are combining Canada and US travel, and might just go to the Alps or Mt Fuji instead.
 

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