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Hangars Blown Away At Burlington Airpark
The wind storm that blew through southern Ontario on Monday heavily damaged Burlington Airpark but amazingly spared most of the airplanes.
The 60-knot winds blew nine hangars up and over the row of hangars immediately behind them. Only one airplane inside the affected hangars was damaged, albeit severely.
“The most amazing thing is to see the planes virtually untouched,” airpark spokesman Tim Crawford told insidehalton.com .
The storm caused widespread damage and power outages and the hangars at the airpark faced them squarely.
The hangars were “facing west, into the teeth of the wind, lifted and flew over another row of hangars” and missed everything else, said Crawford.
“Virtually none of the planes were damaged,” he said.
Crawford said one man was inside his hangar when it blew away.
“He saw the (hangar) door starting to buckle and the next thing he knew he was looking at his vehicle,” parked outside.
The owner of the busy private facility, Vince Rossi, was out of the country at the time but knows about the event.
WestJet Flight Attendants Push Back
WestJet flight attendants, who are not unionized, nevertheless have rejected a new deal from the airline and the airline says it will work to resolve the impasse.
More than 90 percent of flight attendants voted on the undisclosed deal and 57 percent voted against it. Since there is no labour contract, they can’t go on strike but WestJet says there will be more negotiations.
Last week the negotiating committee for WestJet’s non-unionized pilots, the WestJet Pilots Association, recommended its member accept a package it had negotiated with management.
It’s believed the flight attendants’ discontent is centred mainly on working conditions.
Both the airline and the Westjet Flight Attendant Association Board seemed surprised by the outcome.
“We’re going to be gathering some feedback from the flight attendants to figure out what went wrong and then we’ll regroup,” flight attendants’ association chairman Anthony Pascale told the National Post.
WestJet spokesman Tyson Matheson told the Post he has “no doubt that we will come together to resolve the issues that led to these results.”
Loose Screw Lodges in Window
Air Canada and Bombardier are undoubtedly looking into an incident on an Air Canada Express Q400 in which a machine screw came loose from the right engine and was propelled through the outer pane of a window.
A passenger who identified himself only as Skips_LegDay posted images on reddit of the screw, which he said a pilot told him was a spinner bolt, lodged between the outer pane and the inside plastic liner.
The poster said he heard a pop about midway through the flight to Vancouver from an unknown departure point. The altitude of the aircraft also wasn’t clear but there was no mention of depressurization so the flight might have been from a Vancouver Island airport and those are operated below 10,000 feet.
“They figure the bolt must have been struck by the prop after dislodging since the rpms of the spinner itself isn’t high enough to launch it that hard at the window,” he wrote in is post.
The spinner is secured by 12 bolts, the poster said the pilot told him.
Air Canada media relations referred our enquiry to Jazz Aviation, which did not respond before our deadline.
The incident occurred on a flight to Vancouver. It’s not clear when the mishap occurred but the posting went up Tuesday.
Ninety-Nines Awards Presented
The Canadian Ninety-Nines have given the North Atlantic Aviation Museum in Gander, NL and the Canadian Museum of Flight in Langley, B.C. $1,000 each to further projects at those facilities.
At the Gander museum, the money will be used to help build the Ferry Command Memorial Hall, which will house the only complete Lockheed Hudson bomber left in North America.
The B.C. museum will use the money to digitize records and help fund a First World War exhibit tour of northern B.C. communities.
The Ninety-Nines also give grants to female air cadet flying scholarship graduates to build hours. The $500 grants are going to: Chelsea Pearl Nielsen, of 386 Squadron, Lazo, BC; Talya Bar Mettler of 834 Squadron, Warwick, QB; and Bianca Christakos of 11 Squadron, Lethbridge, AB.
The awards are made possible by Aviation Publishers Ltd. and Norm Scudellari in memory of the late Isabel Peppler and Beryl Scudellari, both long-time members of the Ninety-Nines.