By Ken Pole | November 13, 2013 Estimated reading time 6 minutes, 10 seconds.
With more than 35 years in aviation, including several thousand hours in fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, Keith Gladstone made a potentially embarrassing admission at the 2013 Canadian Aerospace Summit in Ottawa. When asked to help with the development of the Peterborough Aerospace Centre (PAC), he said, the first thought that came into his mind was: “Peterborough has an airport?” Amidst chuckles from the audience at the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (AIAC) event, Gladstone said, “That’s really shocking for someone like me. . . . I flew back and forth across the country for a number of years and never landed there – never once realized they had an airport.”
His awareness level has changed in the intervening couple of years. The PAC, which he has helped to evolve through his eponymous Ottawa-based Gladstone Aerospace consultancy, includes an extended 7,000-foot runway and an array of businesses. It also is home to a new Seneca College campus which in January will begin ground and flight training for the second half of the multi-campus institution’s Bachelor of Aviation Technology degree.
The PAC is quickly becoming a paradigm. Gladstone acknowledged during a mid-summit interview with Canadian Skies that “it’s early days, literally” for the centre. It was part of a government/industry display at the Paris Air Show in June and the “overwhelming” feedback enabled the PAC crew to refine their presentation for the “public launch” at the AIAC event.
Dan Taylor, president and CEO of Peterborough Economic Development – self-described as “not an aviation or aerospace person” – explained that the city in the heart of the “iron triangle” (bounded by Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto) has a history of investing in its facilities, and the PAC is viewed as an opportunity to seek out new markets for established partners, while developing opportunities for new ones. The City of Peterborough clearly punches well above its weight in the aviation ring, even though its metropolitan-area population is just under 120,000. The latest Statistics Canada annual report on traffic at 141 airports without control towers shows that Peterborough was the busiest in 2012, with 35,436 movements out of a national total of 670,839.
Gladstone said that when he was recruited to the project by Taylor, he was impressed by what the city had already achieved with its private sector partners and new provincial and federal infrastructure support. “It’s an airport which has had a lot of development . . . from an aerospace perspective, which is different from a pilot’s perspective.” It was and is, he suggested, testament to the capacity to translate a vision into action. So he sat down with Taylor and came up with the PAC concept. “It’s really not about selling an airport,” he explained. “It’s about selling the services . . . that industry can take advantage of.” Rather than asking industry to come and invest, it was more a question of how the PAC could invest in them. “How could we help them do their job better?”
Working on the premise that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts, “We’ve tried to set up a network of partners and different clusters that are going to focus on things such as MROs (maintenance and repair organizations) and education,” Gladstone said. It also helps that “we’re right next door to the third-largest aerospace centre in the world,” he said, referring to Montreal, home to Bombardier Aerospace, Bell Helicopter Textron Canada, CAE, and Pratt & Whitney Canada, to name only a few key players. “We’re looking regionally, nationally and globally for clientele.”
Shortly after the AIAC summit, the PAC crew partnered with Industry Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, and KPMG for a trip to the National Business Aviation Association conference and trade show in Las Vegas, Nev. The mission there, Gladstone said, was to sell the “whole package” of Canada, Ontario and Peterborough, including the tax environment and government support. “Our goal is to shepherd investors through that process,” he said.
Peterborough’s value evidently is already widely appreciated, in that aircraft are being flown in “all the time” from North and South America, as well as Asia, for work. That’s facilitated by the fact that Canada has trade and certification agreements with the U.S., which Canadian-based companies are able to leverage. These are enhanced by a competitive training environment, a highly-educated workforce and, not to be ignored, readily accessible and open airspace.
“The more sophisticated aircraft get, the more we have to stay on the leading edge of everything,” said John Gillespie, president of Peterborough-headquartered Flying Colours Corp. That comment was made when the company invested more than $2 million in technology upgrades, and unveiled plans to expand its facilities to handle larger Airbus and Boeing models. Safran Electronics Canada Incorporated, a subsidiary of the French Sagem conglomerate, is another high-profile Peterborough operation. It has worked with most of the world’s major aircraft manufacturers for several decades.
Gladstone said that when allied with Seneca College, these companies and others represent “some really good bench strength” in the community – muscle that Peterborough Aerospace plans to continue building, with its corporate eyes always on the horizon.
