EDMONTON – A project 5 years in the making has finally come to fruition at the Edmonton International Airport, with a symbolic ribbon-cutting officially opening the newly expanded U.S. departures area for business.
“Today when we opened this to the travelling public and when the first person came through at 4:30 in the morning it was a very proud moment for us,” said EIA President & CEO, Reg Milley.
Amongst the invited officials and guests and the scheduled passengers, was a man who knows first-hand how much the terminal has changed.
“Oh there’s a lot of change, said Einz Schmeling, who helped build the old terminal nearly 50 years ago. “Like I say, at the beginning, there was just the old terminal. A lot of people at the time called it ‘the white elephant.’ But look at where we are now.”
The terminal Shmeling helped build grew from having only two flights to two U.S. airports, to serving 1 million U.S.-bound passengers last year. It’s a level of traffic the old terminal was never designed for, though. And considering the number of passengers flying from EIA to the U.S. is up 9 percent from the year prior, officials have said this expansion couldn’t be coming at a better time.
“For our airline partners, it provides the infrastructure so they can grow and add more flights. we didn’t have that capability – we had a shortage of loading bridges and passenger gates,” said Milley.
But now, the expanded terminal boasts about 11,000 square metres of new space – including new restaurants and retail spaces, as well as a common use lounge for passengers to wait in comfort.
For Sharron Humford, whose late father Glenn Gray was the first passenger to fly out of the old terminal, seeing how far Edmonton’s airport has come holds special meaning.
“In honour of my dad, I am just so proud to be here. He would have loved to be here,” she said. “We are now in the class with the big airports of the world.”
With files from Linda Nguyen, Global News
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