Requiem for an Airport
Montreal's Mirabel Airport was meant to take flying
to new heights of luxury and efficiency
Toronto Star - September 18, 2004
MONTREAL-If James Cherry were to write its epitaph, he'd say this about Mirabel Airport:
"It was a project that was doomed to fail."
Cherry, president of Aéroports de Montréal, the non-profit authority that now runs both of this city's major landing strips, says Mirabel was likely destined to die an early death before it even opened its gates in 1975.
"With the benefit of our hindsight, it was ill-conceived," he says.
Today, the cavernous terminal is almost always empty, and seems haunted by the possibilities that were once envisioned here.
In the glass cathedral of modernist architecture, you can still detect the magical momentum that gripped Montreal between Expo 67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics.
But like the denuded Expo site and the soon-to-be Montreal Expos-less Olympic Stadium, the Mirabel terminal is a mere vestige of long-gone ambitions.
And on Nov. 1, the facility, which was meant to be the central gateway for much of Canada's international air travel, handle up to 50 million passengers a year and take flying to new heights of luxury and efficiency, will instead make an ignominious landing in history's dustbin.
Closing to all passenger traffic at the end of October, the airport - which cost more than $1 billion to build and never handled more than 3 million travellers a year - will almost surely be remembered as one of the biggest government-sponsored boondoggles in the country's history.
Just 29 years after its controversial opening, the mammoth Mirabel, its limping demise as a passenger facility complete, will be pushed into the relatively minor role of cargo airport.
And its monolithic black terminal, a white elephant in 1970s smoked-glass cladding, will be mothballed, or made over into a racetrack, or exhibition hall, or casino, or retirement home, or one of a handful of the other fanciful proposals that have been circling the dying corpse.
The cabbie has a theory about Mirabel's imminent fall.
"It's a conspiracy," George says in heavily accented English.
According to his dark take on the upcoming closure, a group of politically connected landowners around Dorval airport, recently rechristened Pierre Elliott Trudeau International, brought pressure on city leaders to force all passenger traffic to the older landing facility at the west end of Montreal Island.
"These guys, they want to make a lot of money on their land because everyone will want to build around (an expanded) Dorval," George says.
"After that, they'll say, `hey Mirabel was right after all.' Then, it will come back"
But Mirabel, it's nearly certain, will never come back.
And the charge on George's meter is one major reason why.
It now costs $75 to travel by cab from Mirabel to a downtown hotel, some 55 kilometres to the south.
The airport's distance from the central city as well as from connecting flights at far-off Trudeau Airport have been crippling deterrents to Mirabel's success from the time it opened in the fall of 1975.
"The access to that site is a real problem," says Cherry, who notes that all of greater Montreal's 3.2 million inhabitants live well south of the facility.
"A lot of times it takes an hour and a half to get here, and the majority of air travellers these days are looking at flights of less than 2 1/2 hours."
But distance, the main knock against Mirabel for the bulk of Montreal-area travellers, is not the only reason the airport failed to thrive. Far from it.
Indeed, most experts would put Mirabel's location - it's literally surrounded by cornfields - a little down the list of its numerous shortcomings.
More than anything, perhaps, Mirabel is a victim of mistaken assumptions, of deluded 1960s notions about airline technologies, population and economic growth, passenger travel trends and political stability.
"If you look back at the assumptions they made about (Mirabel), were they sensible?" Cherry asks. "With the benefit of hindsight, they were stupid."
The airport's remote location itself was largely driven by flawed technological prognostications, says Jacques Roy, a transportation expert at the University of Montreal's HEC Montreal business school.
"At the time, the new planes that were being built were (supersonic) Concordes, which required long runways and were noisy and not very environmentally friendly," says Roy, who has studied Mirabel for more than two decades.
"So, the idea was to build an airport far away from the city centre and people."
The Concorde and its planned cousins, of course, never materialized as important or popular crafts in the world's airliner fleets, Roy says.
And the wide-body jets that instead came to dominate international travel over the ensuing decades were built to be far quieter and cleaner than their groundbreaking intercontinental predecessors, such as the noisy and noxious Boeing 707.
This new generation of jets, the Boeing 747 being the prototype, would prove to be far less objectionable to Montrealers living in the heavily populated Dorval area, where noise complaints provided one of Mirabel's raisons d'être.
More important, however, they also had the fuel capacity to pass over the city entirely.
"Before it was even opened in 1975, it could be demonstrated that Mirabel was no longer needed," Roy says.
The combination of longer-range jets and the increasing attractiveness of economically surging Toronto as a primary destination for European travellers through the 1970s made Mirabel's planned "gateway" status a hard sell from the get-go, Roy says.
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`In the end, Mirabel was a compromise
that really didn't work for anybody'
Jacques Roy, University of Montreal
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Long-range planes, coupled with passenger and airline demand for direct Toronto access, forced the federal transport ministry - which had long made European landings in Montreal mandatory - to allow a migration of international flights westward.
So, even as Ottawa was pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Mirabel, airplane technologies and economic shifts were conspiring to make it obsolete, Cherry says.
"When Mirabel was conceived ... it was with the constraints that the technology would only let them fly as far as Montreal and that the Canadian government was going to force them to land in Montreal," he says.
"And as hard as it is for a Montrealer to admit this, the economic centre of gravity in this country has moved 350 miles west and so did the flights."
The airport's location, near the community of Mirabel, Roy says, was also a big mistake, the result of a fundamentally flawed compromise between the federal and Quebec governments that satisfied no one in the end.
Roy, who wrote a study on Mirabel for the province in the mid-1980s, says Ottawa had originally intended the new facility to be the international airport for the Canadian capital as well. Thus, Transport Canada, he says, envisioned it being built to the west of Montreal.
The province, on the other hand, was looking to lure Quebec city travellers to the airport, and wanted it built to the east, near Drummondville, almost halfway between the two cities.
"In the end, Mirabel was a compromise that really didn't work for anybody and that nobody was excited about," Roy says.
Poor location and shifting economies helped ensure that subsequent Mirabel plans, which once envisioned the construction of five more terminal buildings on the site, would never be completed, he says.
Roy says Mirabel, which pushed some 3,500 farming families off about 40,000 hectares of land, also relied on erroneous predictions of passenger volumes that were based on the astronomical increases recorded in the 1960s.
For a variety of reasons, including the '70s oil crisis that peaked during Mirabel's construction, these passenger volumes never materialized. Passenger increases were curtailed even further by the flight of some 200,000 anglophones from Montreal after the 1976 election of the separatist Parti Québécois.
And yet another flawed technological decision made Mirabel less attractive still. The massive terminal was built with a mere six gates, Cherry says.
Instead of accessing the terminal directly from their planes, Mirabel passengers would be moved from the infield via a fleet of passenger transport vehicles (PTVs).
A sort of moving gate ramp, the PTVs could rise up, elevator-like, to a plane's doorways, lower passengers down to ground level and run like a bus to the terminal.
This process, however, could add as much as 40 minutes to a round trip, and quickly proved unpopular, Cherry says.
It didn't have to be this way.
Even with all of the unfortunate technical and economic baggage that was piled on the airport from its inception, Mirabel might still have been a success, Cherry says.
In particular, he says, its crippling remoteness from the city could have been mitigated by the promised road and rail infrastructure, which, for both political and economic reasons, never materialized.
"If they had built the (expected) access roads necessary, if they had built the dedicated train line, probably we would be having a very different discussion today," Cherry says.
Roy says the election of the PQ government in 1976 helped to put a stop to the planned access improvements that had been promised for Mirabel.
"I don't think they were very excited about throwing good money at completing infrastructure to Mirabel airport, which was something coming from the federal government."
Cherry also says a decision in the early 1980s to split air traffic between the city's two airports would prove "fatal" to Mirabel.
"The minute they moved the international airlines (to Mirabel) and left the domestic and transborder guys here (at Dorval), it killed any transfer business."
With transfer times between international and domestic flights being lowered in many modern airports to well under an hour, the 3 1/2-to four-hour gaps between Mirabel and Dorval flights became insupportable.
And now, it's far too late.
Cherry says assembling all of Montreal's passenger traffic at Mirabel today would have required the construction of at least one more runway and terminal, and cost the authority at least twice the $600 million it is now spending on its impressive expansion of Trudeau.
"And there would still be no guarantee that the province would build the required road and rail infrastructure it would need."
This accumulation of problems meant Mirabel's days were numbered when Cherry arrived as head of the airport authority in 2001.
"Montreal is a city that in my view ... was not large enough or important enough to sustain two airports," Cherry recalled thinking at the time.
"We were running $23 million a year deficits supporting the two airports and we very, very quickly came to the realization that it couldn't be sustained."
In 1997, at the insistence of the major airlines, all regularly scheduled international flights were transferred to the Dorval site, which had always retained the city's domestic and transborder activity.
With the movement of regular international flights to Dorval, a 30-minute cab ride from downtown, only charter flights have continued to provide passengers for the 1 million square foot Mirabel terminal.
And with just 75 flights during an average week and 800,000 passengers annually, the behemoth facility became a ghost of its former self.
And the Trudeau expansion, which should provide passenger capacity for Montreal for the next 35 or 40 years, makes a return to Mirabel a very poor bet.
"If we go back to Mirabel in 40 years, that terminal building that everybody keeps talking about will be 70 years old," Cherry says.
"It barely responds to aviation today. It certainly won't respond to civil aviation 35 or 40 years from now."
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