Southern Alberta municipalities join forces to develop airports

Cardston County, the Municipal District of Pincher Creek, the Municipal District of Willow Creek and the Town of Fort Macleod have joined forces to develop their airports as a regional aviation and aerospace cluster.

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Between them they bring four fields with genuine range, says the Alberta SouthWest Regional Alliance in a Tuesday news release.

Pincher Creek (CZPC) has two kilometres of runway and approach lighting, and already hosts an airtanker base, air ambulance and helicopter operations.

Claresholm Industrial (CEJ4) has purpose-built airport zoning and growing flight training interest.

Fort Macleod (CEY3), sitting at the junction of Highways 2 and 3, has hangar lots ready to sell, and Cardston (CEA6), is minutes from the U.S. border with a new pilot’s lounge and room to grow, says Alberta SouthWest.

Four airports that know what each other is building can each go after what they are actually good at, and the region can tell one confident story instead of four quiet ones, says the alliance, which represents municipalities across southwest Alberta.

“The assets here are real, and they are more interesting together than apart,” said Sean Miles, Alberta SouthWest’s investment development director.

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“Pincher Creek can handle aircraft the others cannot. Claresholm is already a natural home for training and maintenance. Fort Macleod has the zoning and the lots. Cardston has the border.

“Put those four side by side and you are looking at a region with something to offer, not four small airports hoping for the best.”

A Regional Aerospace Cluster Environmental Scan, completed for Alberta SouthWest in February, described the airport system as asset-rich but capacity-poor, with substantial runways, land and uncongested airspace across the region. But it also found no single rural municipality can afford the specialized aviation planning expertise that turns an airport into an economic asset.

Alberta SouthWest found the scan’s conclusion encouraging.

“The constraint is coordination, not concrete. And crucially, the scan found that not one community saw the others as competition,” it said.

The scan pointed to flight training and workforce development, aircraft maintenance and specialized services, emergency and wildfire response, and applied drone work as where the region “can realistically win.”

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