Saint-Hubert airport will become a hub for Canadian flights, with the announcement on Monday of the construction of a new terminal in partnership with Porter Aviation. The project, which also includes the construction of a 130-room hotel, will eventually be able to accommodate four million passengers per year.
The construction works of the new terminal with an area of 21,000 m2 are scheduled to begin in mid-2023 and be completed by the end of 2024. The terminal and hotel represent a $200 million investment by Aéroport Montréal Saint-Hubert, in partnership with Porter Aviation Holdings and the hotelier Holiday Inn.
Carrier Porter, which is also present at Montreal-Trudeau airport, plans to serve all major Canadian cities and will also be able to transfer passengers from regional carrier Pascan, which must add other regional services at the same time. Porter will use 78-seat De Havilland Dash 8-400 and 132-seat Embraer E195-E2 aircraft. The project should make it possible to create more than 500 permanent jobs, underlines the carrier.
The general manager of Saint-Hubert airport, Yanic Roy, wanted to be reassured at a press conference on Monday about noise pollution. Under a recent agreement, night flights will be banned from April 2024. In addition, aircraft on commercial flights gain altitude quickly, he said. “The inconvenience to local residents will be practically nil,” he argued.
“One of the parameters of the agreement with the airport is to contribute to the achievement of our objectives: we are aiming for carbon neutrality for 2050 in Longueuil. We are also talking about the quality of life of citizens, which is so important and which is respected by the development announced today,” argued the Mayor of Longueuil, Catherine Fournier.
Concerns
These remarks do not reassure the citizens who are members of the Planes Antipollution Committee – Longueuil (CAPA-L), which has been campaigning for years for better supervision of the activities of the Saint-Hubert airport and its noise pollution.
Spokesperson within this committee, Marie-Pierre Brunelle has the impression that citizens have been presented with a fait accompli. “There had been public consultations a few months ago. It was a very good step forward, but the recommendations talked about harmonious development, impact studies carried out beforehand and green energies. However, the plan announced today contradicts the recommendations of these consultations, ”she says.
Mme Brunelle points out that, for the past ten years, citizens have denounced the activities of flight schools, helicopter tours and night flights. Night activities should in theory be eliminated from 2024, but for the rest, the other existing problems will not be corrected, she indicates. “We propose an additional development. We are not fixing the situation. »
She doubts that the environmental claims related to the project will materialize. “There are no silent, non-polluting planes. They are going to do XX air transporte century. There’s nothing green about it,” she says.
A zone of innovation
The choice of Saint-Hubert has several advantages for Porter, which will benefit from lower operating costs, and it will allow it to avoid the saturation of large airports such as Pearson and Montreal-Trudeau, explains Mehran Ebrahimi, director of the International Observatory of Aeronautics and Civil Aviation, UQAM.
“It’s close to Montreal. There is a significant population density on the South Shore — and in the area that can extend to Drummondville and Trois-Rivières. Porter will also develop an electric shuttle between its terminal and the Longueuil metro. He is going to make Saint-Hubert his parent company, in a way,” he underlines.
Are citizens right to worry about noise pollution? “It’s true that the number of flights is increasing — by about 10% — but the planes that will be used will be very different from the planes we know and which create dissatisfaction. These are new generation planes, the Embraers, which are about half as noisy as the previous generation, ”he argues.
These planes gain altitude much faster and should be less disruptive than planes used by flight schools that fly at lower altitudes, adds the expert.
According to Ebrahimi, the new terminal project and the arrival of Porter could benefit the region and help create an aeronautical innovation zone around the airport. “Roughly a third of aerospace companies [au Québec] are already in the Longueuil agglomeration,” he recalled.
With The Canadian Press