Flight academy boosts Medicine Hat airport traffic
CBC
Claire Courty is one of more than 50 high school students contributing to a surge in activity at the regional airport in Medicine Hat, Alta.
The 17-year-old says she has taken to the sky over southeast Alberta at least 20 times since the start of the year thanks to Prairie Rose public division’s flight school.
A partnership launched six years ago between the Dave Rozdeba South Alberta Flight Academy and Super T Aviation allows Courty and her peers to acquire their private pilot's licence along with their high school diploma.
That training, according to airport manager Logan Boyd, is a key contributor in positioning Medicine Hat Regional Airport as one of the fastest growing in Canada by air traffic activity this quarter.
The year-to-date number of takeoffs and landings on the Medicine Hat runway is 48 per cent higher compared to the 12 months prior, according to Statistics Canada figures.
Records show there were 28,263 movements at Medicine Hat’s airport, up from 19,097 the previous year.
The high school academy is responsible for roughly a third of those movements, or about 4,700 flights, according to Super T Aviation director Doug Little.
And he said that's been steadily increasing.
Little added he expects the airport to fly past 30,000 movements during the next year due to more training opportunities, including with the flight academy.
Boyd also credited the increased activity to HALO Air Ambulance, an emergency response service based at the airport that flies a pair of helicopters across southeast Alberta, and fixed-wing patient transfer service CanWest Air.
Courty, who is halfway through Grade 12, had her opening “discovery flight” in September 2023. A few months later, she took over the controls for the first time.
“It was really exciting. It was a lot of adrenaline,” Courty told CBC News from inside a workshop by the airport where students in her program are building a small plane.
The flight students spend a large part of their week at Prairie Rose’s new building by the airport, when they aren’t at their high school studying with everyone else.
Courty is on a fast track to become a commercial pilot, helped along by the academy she’ll graduate from next spring. That puts her ahead of many potential competitors for the price of $15,000 — half the cost of typical flight schools.
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