On Friday, the freshly-paved apron at the Weyburn airport was the scene of an announcement by the provincial government that the intake window for applications for the Community Airport Partnership program was open. The apron itself was able to be done thanks to the program. 

“We applied at the beginning of the year to the CAP funding program to rego the entrance of the airport,” explained Jennifer Wilkinson. She is the Director of Engineering with the City of Weyburn. “It was showing significant degradation and one of our key focuses is this is where what I would say is like vacationing planes come through; they might park here.” 

Making a good impression on those who are coming to the airport wasn’t the only reason for the upgrade to get done. There was a key element of providing a crucial service to Weyburn and the surrounding area. 

“The main priority for us is, this is where STARS lands, and we want to ensure that there’s a proper landing area for STARS to ensure that we could provide that emergency service to the area.” 

The work that was done this year at the Weyburn airport was covered with a $88,600 grant from the CAP program. This included mulching the existing pavement at the entrance and then using mulched asphalt by reshaping and compacting it to be a subbase for asphalt overlay.  

The apron isn’t the only work that has been done at the airport in recent years, with a number of upgrades being done to facilitate the traffic that comes through the Weyburn airport. While many think of things such as crop dusters and sprayers, there is a lot more traffic than just that which comes through the airport.  

“We also have some other commercial operations,” Wilkinson added. “We do have airplanes that fly pipelines, so they will be doing leak detection for the oil field. We will have some of the oil fields actually have charter planes come through with their employees from typically Calgary. I know recreationally, we have some acrobatic plans here as well as, you know, family aviationists.” 

The recent upgrades in the past years at the Weyburn airport have included work on the taxiways, crack sealing, work on the main runway and upgrading a lot of the asphalt at the airport.

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