By Andy Cline | September 23, 2016 Estimated reading time 3 minutes, 58 seconds.
Air Canada broke ground on Sept. 22 to mark the start of construction of its new, state-of-the-art Hangar 5 at Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson International Airport. Located in the midst of the Air Canada maintenance campus at Pearson, it will occupy land formerly used by a hangar which was demolished this spring. The new facility will be sandwiched between two existing hangars on Silver Dart Drive.
The building will help to replace Air Canada’s Hangar 8, at the end of the same row of hangars, which will be demolished to accommodate Toronto’s Terminal 3 expansion starting in 2017.
The new $90 million Hangar 5 project is part of Air Canada’s ongoing Toronto global hub expansion. The primary contractor for the project is Ledcor Construction. The new hangar will have 127,000 square feet of floor space, equal to seven hockey rinks, with a 77-foot ceiling. The facility will be able to accommodate up to three wide-body and two narrow-body aircraft simultaneously, and will be optimized for the airline’s new Boeing 787 Dreamliner fleet.
With completion planned for April 2018, it will be the largest freestanding uninterrupted commercial hangar span in Canada, at 535 feet without support columns.
Environmentally friendly features include low energy LED lighting, “light harvesting” via sidewall panels that let in exterior light, radiant heating, and new high-efficiency hangar doors. The doors consist of six leaves, each approximately 75 feet high and wide, that open at the rate of 60 feet per minute. The door will feature an aperture which allows an aircraft tail to protrude outside the hangar while the door is closed. These attributes combine to help prevent energy loss with faster door closure in cold weather.
The hangar will house approximately 150 work stations in the office area. It will have multiple classrooms able to accommodate 200 people, offering a huge leap in training options compared to previous facilities at YYZ, and also has a cafeteria for 100 people.
“Air Canada is demonstrating its commitment to international expansion at its Toronto global hub by investing $90 million on this project to create a new hangar,” said Benjamin Smith, president, Passenger Airlines at Air Canada. “We have grown our Toronto operations by more than 50 per cent since 2009. This building, our second major construction project in the Greater Toronto Area following the opening of a new $60 million operations centre in Brampton in 2013, will support Air Canada’s future growth by giving us state-of-the-art maintenance storage and training facilities in an environmentally-friendly structure.”
Richard Steer, Air Canada’s VP of maintenance and engineering, added, “The rapid growth of Air Canada’s wide-body fleet, from 56 aircraft in 2009 to almost 100 by 2017 has necessitated the growth of line maintenance capability at Pearson. Twenty-one of 37 new Boeing 787 Dreamliners have been delivered, and they will be joined by the Boeing 737 MAX starting in 2017 and the Bombardier C Series in 2019. The new hangar will significantly increase our ability to carry out line maintenance on the growing fleet.”
As an ex Air Canada employee whose responsibility was the maintenance of these hangars in Toronto I am keenly interested in the proceedings there. Nice to see the upgrade to LED lighting. The older facilities should be done as well.