Vancouver International Airport (YVR) showed off changes Tuesday it said will help prevent a repeat of the holiday travel chaos witnessed in the run-up to Christmas last year.
A winter storm ripped through Metro Vancouver the week before the holiday — YVR’s busiest week of the year.
That set off a cascading chain of issues — including some passengers being stuck aboard aircraft for up to 11 hours, and thousands of others sleeping on the floors of the airport, thanks to 1,300 delayed or cancelled flights.
“The issue wasn’t so much that we didn’t forecast the weather, the issue was the way the weather came and the traffic congestion we had on the airfield,” YVR president and CEO Tamara Vrooman told Global News.
“So what we saw was people waiting unacceptable delays on aircraft as we waited for vacant aircraft to be towed off the gate in the snow so that full aircraft could get onto those gates.”
In the wake of the travel mess, YVR commissioned an after-action report and conducted a public survey aimed at preventing a repeat.
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Vrooman said Tuesday that the airport had made “significant” changes based on that review, including spending $40 million on technology, staff and equipment to build resilience and redundancies into airport operations.
That investment includes 19 new pieces of heavy equipment like trucks and snowplows, she said.
“$40 million is quite a significant investment we have made in ensuring we have extra capacity for irregular operations,” Vrooman said.
“One of the things we’re seeing, as we saw yesterday, is that mother nature is giving us more unusual and more frequent extreme weather events.”
On the technology side, Vrooman pointed to the airport’s “digital twin,” a virtual model of the airport that runs real-time data on everything from the location of aircraft and equipment to the flow of passengers through the facility.
That model is now being shared with all airport partners, including border security, airlines, ground crews and staff, Vrooman said.
“It will show us when we’re going to have a lineup at the border, it shows us when we’re going to have a lineup at (airport security), it shows us when an aircraft has been on the gate for longer than was anticipated, it shows us how many passengers actually showed up and went through the gate versus how many were booked, and everything in between,” she said.
The airport has also changed its protocols on how aircraft are gated and moved. Vrooman said one major problem during last year’s storm was that some airlines weren’t able to get their aircraft out of gates for various reasons, and YVR didn’t have the tools or authority to move them.
The airport now has the ability through contractors to move airlines’ aircraft for them if needed, and airlines must demonstrate they can get off of a gate within 30 minutes, Vrooman said.
More staff will be posted on the airfield and inside the airport, and passengers will have access to a new journey mapping platform and upgraded airport news page, which will lead storm communications.
“I cannot guarantee that winter won’t disrupt a flying schedule, we do see that weather events do tend to slow things down for safety and security reasons no matter where you are in Canada,” Vrooman said.
“But what I can say is we have better information more proactively communicated to people so they can make decisions, we have better data tools so we can allocate resources here, and we have built in redundancy so that the kind of wait times and congestion we saw last year should not be part of our future.”
YVR expects up to two million passengers to transit the airport this December, with the busiest travel days Dec. 20, 21 and 22.
— with files from Alissa Thibault