If you’re flying into the Deloraine Airport, you’ll see the flashing lights on either side of the runway to facilitate your landing, and now you’ll have the GPS approach guide you in all the way.

The Deloraine Airport Commission has re-instated their GPS landing system for the 4000 ft long, 75 ft wide, paved runway.

Deloraine airport member, Lorne Bolduc, says having the GPS system back is an important feature to their airport as there is a fair amount of activity at the airport when it comes to medical transfers from the local hospitals.

“Through the winter we’ve actually had quite a few medevac planes come into the airport these past 2 to 3 weeks,” explains Bolduc.  “We’ve had half a dozen or so that I know of, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been more.  Some just come in to drop people off, or pick people up, depending on what the schedule is, and there seems to be more transfers this year than we’ve seen in the past.  A lot of times before we had a lot of emergencies, but now it seems to be more transfers.”

Having re-instated the GPS approach into their landing system makes for a safer landing for their members, visitors and medi-vac planes that frequent the Deloraine Airport.

Bolduc says they’ve had to source extra funding to pay for the annual fee to keep the GPS approach.  To reinstate the GPS system came at a $5000 price tag, but to keep the service requires as annual fee of $4000.

“Now the government wants to charge $4000 a year to keep the GPS approach whereas before it cost us nothing.  Once we did the initial install, just to make sure there weren’t any buildings or any type of towers interfering with the approach, that $4000 been an added cost; $5,000 for the initial once every 5 years, and then $4000 each year on top of that.”

“So, sourcing funding for that has been a little tough to do, because everybody is in the same boat as far as looking for funding,” he adds.

Bolduc adds they’ve reached out to neighboring communities and municipalities to help carry some of the costs to keep the GPS system active.

“We’ve been sending some letters out from the town, asking for funding from local communities and other municipalities to actually help with some of the funding, if that’s possible.  We know everybody’s budgets are strained,” he adds, “but any little bit helps.”

Maintaining the runway has been almost a daily chore with the amount of snow and blowing snow that keeps drifting in.  “Luckily we’ve had some great volunteers to help us out and really that’s all that this airport runs on, is volunteers; that both members and non-members helping us out out here.”

Approximately a dozen local pilots store their planes at the Deloraine Airport hangars, with a surge of activity over the summer months due to members and visitors flying in an out, and spray plane activity.

“There are a lot of summertime flights out of here other than just the local guys,” share Bolduc. 

“That seems to be fairly busy because this is one of the longest airstrips between Estevan, SK and ... I think, Morden.  So, it makes it tricky for those guys when the weather is a little bit off and they have to fly off a paved strip because there’s quite a distance between the two of them.”