Transport committee  In terms of PBN, at the major airports in Canada where we're really dealing with the airlines, we're probably only about five years away from reaching critical mass. I think the real issue is going to be is with general aviation aircraft. To the extent they would interact at som

Transport committee  Yes, as a matter of fact the new AWOS was developed by Nav Canada at our expense. We spent millions of dollars to do that in replacing the old legacy systems. One place we tested it for a year and a half, which we had to do in order to satisfy the regulator that it worked, was I

Transport committee  I'll stand corrected, because I do recall a Toronto-Winnipeg one using, say, an A320. Calgary-Ottawa would probably be twice that. For the Calgary-Ottawa, our charge to the airline probably would be around $2,000 or $2,400.

Transport committee  Yes, that's a big part of it.

Transport committee  No. With of PBN, you have to get into three-dimensional geometry of sorts. PBN allows aircraft to fly precise curves and arcs and to keep absolutely precise distances from each other, and to do this totally independent of anything on the ground, with no ground-based aid. It doesn

Transport committee  Yes, that's correct. I would just add that the system was not performing very well at the time. It was falling behind in technology. There were a lot of delays. It was understaffed, and technology projects were failing. Not too many things were running right.

Transport committee  There were a number of different models looked at. There was broad consultation with all of the stakeholders in aviation. Having an ordinary for-profit business corporation was looked at. The aviation industry itself was not in favour of that. It was more in favour of the non-s

Transport committee  Our charges are made to the owners and operators of aircraft. In the case of airlines, our charges are to them. The charges to the airlines are weight- and distance-related. The larger the weight of the aircraft and the farther it flies in the airspace we're looking after, then t

Transport committee  What has really happened, I guess, is a partial implementation of PBN, which allows the aircraft approaching Toronto to stay higher longer, thereby changing some of what we call the “bedposts” or final approach fixes for the different runways. What it has done is that people wil

Transport committee  As I indicated before the meeting, we'll certainly meet with you and look into that. But I can tell you that I'm familiar enough with what was done that this should not have any noise impacts on anybody. In fact, it should lessen the overall noise. But we'll look at the individ

Transport committee  I don't believe that's much of a factor. I think it's more that the approaches into the Toronto area have changed, and that means aircraft will be seen in areas where they didn't used to be seen. It's not really the ground movements.

Transport committee  Wind turbines can cause primary radar to detect false targets or mask a target. We're quite concerned about it in those areas where it could impact our primary radars. We have been trying to work with the wind farm proponents to mitigate that. As I understand it, there are not a

Transport committee  I think the incident involved an engine failure of an aircraft. Some of the internal parts of the engine got blown out the back. Obviously Nav Canada played a role, when the pilot declared an emergency, to deal with it, but I think that's really more of an airline issue.

Transport committee  The vertical separation in en route airspace is 1,000 feet. That is not so much a GPS factor as it is advances in altimetry. The 1,000-foot separation has been in use now for probably a decade around the world, and I'm not aware of any incidents. When it comes to the safety stand

Transport committee  The ATM itself is largely just software. It's not really dependent on.... I mean, there's lots of hardware you can run the software on. That's not a problem. We do have relationships with particular suppliers where we will enter into cooperative arrangements with them to bid on w