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By Caden Fanshaw

Air Travel

Ho, ho, no! Air travellers left scrambling with extreme delays, cancellations ahead of Christmas Day

Dec 23, 2022 | 4:12 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – Just as thousands head home for the holidays, mother nature is proving to be too much.

Air travel was mostly suspended throughout the day Friday from Prince George due to major weather disruptions at Vancouver International Airport (YVR). The poor weather forced Westjet to cancel all flights from midnight Thursday into Friday evening.

Despite the snow-clearing operations in Prince George having success, it was the contrary for YVR where the winter chaos continued. Other airports in the province were all in the same state, merely frozen due to the state of Vancouver.

Dr. Paul Collard, a certified commercial pilot and President at the Vanderhoof Airport Development Society said the airlines have few options when severe winter weather arrives.

“Airlines really have two sort of strategies when it comes to this, one is we’ll keep flying and hope we get out of here and hope we get to the place we’re going and we can land,” said Collard. “The other strategy which has been adopted more recently is we’ll try and anticipate really bad conditions and we’ll stop flying like WestJet has already declared today, they’re not flying.”

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Collard said cancelling flights before bad weather is the right move as it can prevent airline crew from being scattered and unable to fly their scheduled routes. According to Collard it may take some time for flights to get back to their normal schedules even after the winter weather is over due to the scheduling nightmare.

Air Ambulance unable to fly to BC’s South Coast:

A spokesperson for BC Emergency Health Services said despite the troubles for commercial passengers, air travel for medical reasons via BC EHS will continue where possible. Any transfers to coastal locations will have to be paused until the weather improves.

“Freezing rain and/or severe turbulence and low ceilings/limited visibility have been forecasted and/or reported from the Lower Mainland up the coast to Prince Rupert, making it unsafe for any air transfers into or out of any coastal airports and helipads.”

BC EHS will continue to monitor conditions to allow for the earliest opportunity to transfer patients for medical services when needed.