Flight schools at Boundary Bay Airport are still hurting due to restrictions imposed during the Winter Olympics two years ago.
Extra tight security measures because of the Winter Games in Vancouver remained in place from January to late March of 2010.
Flight schools at Boundary Bay and Squamish airports faced restrictions on solo flights, non point-to-point flying and night flying. Other operators also felt impacts due to additional screening requirements and other security measures.
At the time, the Pacific Flying Club's Pat Kennedy, who's also with the Air Transport Association of Canada, estimated her flight school went down to 30 per cent of its usual business.
Fast-forward to this year and things still haven't recovered to where they were before, she told the Optimist last week.
"I would agree a lot of the flight schools never really recovered totally from that. We lost a lot of international business to other jurisdictions in Canada, or those students went home and never came back," she said.
Flight school movements make Boundary Bay Airport one of Canada's busiest.
However, a Delta senior staffer recently told the Boundary Bay Airport Advisory Committee that aircraft movements dropped from 208,000 in 1997 to 144,000 in 2010. The drop in 2010 was associated with the Olympic restrictions.
Committee members were told flight schools at Boundary Bay have not recovered from 2010 and "are consequently not doing well."
Kennedy said some of the schools that rely more on international students suffered the biggest impacts.
Two years ago a strategic communication firm was hired to lobby Ottawa for compensation. The Ministry of Transport reported back at that time there is no funding available and nothing has changed on that front.
"What we're doing now is using the political route. We still don't understand why there's compensation for the G-20 (summit) in Ontario, but not for the Olympics," Kennedy said.
"We're just asking for recovery of our fixed costs that were unavoidable during that time. We weren't asking for lost revenue... the different politicians kept passing the buck to different ministries," she added.
In late 2010, a group of flight schools, including the Pacific Flying Club, announced it was going to file a lawsuit, through the Air Transport Association of Canada, against the federal government.
Kennedy now said they don't like their prospects, based on how Cambie Street merchants failed to win compensation over construction of the Canada Line.
