Flying From Kelowna

Flying from Kelowna has always been a big deal and fraught with adventure. I'm not talking about biplanes and barnstorming in the 1920s but from the 1980s onward. I moved to the Okanagan in 1971 so my history here begins then. Mostly through the decade of the '70s, I didn't fly out of Kelowna except down the highway in my Shantung yellow Super Beetle. Even though the time to drive to Vancouver over Highway 3, the Hope-Princeton, was usually seven to eight hours, the price of purple farm gas was only 25 cents per gallon and time was relatively free.

What is now the Kelowna International Airport, YLW, started out in a one room building with a short runway. The building was still there even after the new terminal construction began and didn't entirely disappear until 2010. The runway had a dip in the middle so small planes as seen from the ground would disappear while taking off. There was a temporary short control tower for years at the new terminal and they also lost sight of planes in the dip.

When time for driving to Vancouver started to be in short supply, I flew by the cheapest carrier Time Air. The airline was well named because it took time. One flight was on a DC3 or DC4 in winter. Remember, this is the 1980s and the DC4 was developed before WWII. It is the iconic plane that still stood in a tail down position on the tarmac. The plane had overnighted in Kelowna and for my morning flight was cold. The crew wore their winter coats as did the passengers. We carried our own bags aboard and stowed them just behind the cockpit in a rack. We trundled down the runway, slowly climbed into the air and headed to Vancouver by way of Kamloops. The flight time was close to four hours what today takes one.

We also had a major airline servicing Kelowna in those days, Pacific Western Airlines or PWA, with modern aircraft. They were quickly dubbed Please Wait Awhile by the flying public. Delays were common. Flying into or out of Kelowna in the winter used to depend on weather and whether the airport had a low overcast. Many times we would wait for a plane only to hear it flying past because they could not see to land. This was all prior to the new control tower and radar assisted landings.

PWA wasn't always free from mechanical failures either. I was waiting for my flight to arrive from Alberta which landed but proceeded to run off the end of the runway because the brakes failed. We then had a two hour delay while another plane was scrounged up. This flight had to go via Penticton to pick up passengers from another plane whose door failed to close adequately. It seems to me now that the flying public was less stressed back then and took this as just part of the great game of life and had a laugh.

YLW is now the 10th busiest airport in Canada with over 2 million passengers last year. It seems to be continually in expansion mode. It is served by two national airlines and six or seven regional ones, one flying to Seattle. YLW is also the home to Kelowna Flightcraft (now known as KF Aerospace) which repairs, rebuilds and services aircraft. KF is now the maintenance depot for Westjet and they have 1,000 employees.

It is still an adventure to fly from Kelowna. Last year I had a flight booked to Victoria on Pacific Coastal Airways, a regional carrier. Unfortunately, the main terminal does not have room for all the aircraft that can be on the tarmac at the same time. I had to walk half a kilometre north of the terminal to where the plane waited, right in front of where the old single room terminal used to sit. We have come full circle.