Northwest Territories airports don’t measure up. Some missing basic technology to allow planes to land in fog

The aviation industry is a lifeline for many people in the North.

Planes bring in people, food and products for the many communities without year-round road access which are spread thousands of kilometres apart throughout the North.

But do these northern airports measure up to those in the rest of Canada?

Krista Waymouth is a pilot with Yellowknife-based airline Air Tindi. She came up North seven years ago to find adventure.

As a bush pilot, she found there is no shortage of hair-raising experiences.

“We go into places where we don’t always have services and stuff like that so, where they're flying down south they're usually going airport to airport and have all the amenities where we kind of have to, sometimes have to make do with what we have,” said Waymouth.

8 N.W.T. airports without GPS maps

There are 27 airports spread across the territory. Most of them have gravel runways and little navigational help for pilots.

“The reality is, there simply isn’t the population base in the N.W.T. to pay for a lot of these things,” said Stephen Nourse, the executive director of the Northern Air Transport Association.

Many airports, like the one in Wekweeti, N.W.T., don’t have GPS help for when they approach. Instead, pilots must be able to see the runway in order to land.

In September, days of dense fog meant flights couldn't land in the small community of about 140 people.

This effectively cut them off from groceries, supplies and travel for a week and stranded other community members in Yellowknife until the fog cleared.

When CBC News spoke with one of the stranded Wekweeti residents in September, she said the experience was draining.

“I'm really tired and just want to get home. This is so frustrating. I just want to sleep in my own bed and get home to my grandchildren,” said Marie Adele Football.

Nav Canada is a private, not-for-profit corporation which oversees Canada’s civil air navigation. It’s in charge of setting up special instruments to help pilots land in these kinds of conditions.

These maps, which are put together using satellites, are expensive and can take months or even years to create.

But Nav Canada says it’s trying to get these maps set up at seven of the eight airports in the Northwest Territories which don’t currently have them.

Nourse says they hope to have this done within the next few years. But he adds that is not soon enough.

“If the federal government is serious about their northern agenda, sovereignty, economic access to the North, it has to look at injecting some money into this northern infrastructure,” he said.

For now, all Waymouth and other bush pilots can do is wait.

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