Region of Waterloo International Airport - YKF

[ZEBuilder]

I’d forgotten about the plan for the third runway.  I guess the idea is that you’d need it in order to get more length in the 14-32 directions?  The length then being important for giving larger planes more options with poor wind/weather conditions. 

Otherwise it seems kind of silly.  I suppose it could increase GA operations - but only in situations where the wind cooperates and you can actually use both runways.  GA (particular students at a flight school) have much stricter crosswind requirements so there would be lots of times you’re limited to one runway anyway.

My gut feeling is that a third runway is on par with the Pickering airport plans.  Never going to happen but maybe still worth some minimum restrictions in the area to protect for the remote possibility.

Also, those maps are unnecessarily oriented weirdly.  Confused me thoroughly for a few seconds.

The third runway does add some resiliency to the system, I doubt we'd every be busy enough to justify parallel take off and landings but weirder things have happened. I'd have to check the length thats planned but it's certainly possible for the third runway to be longer to provide that second option for larger aircraft. 

The extension of 14-32 will allow for larger aircrafts to land (the same size as the current 08-26 allows). If we want to provide a second option for larger aircrafts that could land on the extended 08-26 we'd either need to extend 14-32 again, which is possible but not exactly the simplest, or we build the parallel 14-32 runway (3rd runway).

Another thing is if we have enough air travel at some point in the future it is useful for another runway in the event something happens at the intersection of runways, let's say 14-32R and 08-26 (assuming we're looking from the west) so the third runway in this case would be 14-32L which would still allow for restricted operations to occur at the airport while the 14-32R and 08-26 runways are closed which is always beneficial.

You wouldn't be able to increase GA operations in terms of flying in different wind conditions since the third runway would be parallel to the existing 14-32, but it would allow for more capacity. The third runway could be built at a different angle but that's a bad idea for a bunch of reasons.