OGDENSBURG — Officials from the Ogdensburg Bridge and Port Authority on Feb. 15 and 16 flew to Smyrna, Tennessee, to meet with Contour Airlines with the aim of preventing canceled and delayed flights between Ogdensburg International Airport and Philadelphia.
Weather-related cancellations due to a high number of severe storms this winter have led to public frustration, but officials from both bodies are hoping to turn that around. That included a two-week period at the end of January when only three Contour flights could safely land in Ogdensburg, and returning passengers got stranded in Philadelphia.
“Based on weather events, it started kind of mid-January. You can follow the weather events and (the flight cancellations) were all associated with that,” OBPA Executive Director Steven J. Lawrence said.
Because of that, he said he and OBPA Board of Directors Chairman Vernon D. “Sam” Burns decided to fly down to Tennessee for talks where “we asked Contour, what can we do?”
Frequent snow and ice storms this winter have been a main cause of canceled flights in and out of the city. In response, the OBPA is seeking grant money to build a hangar large enough to house one of Contour’s Embraer jets.
“When there’s bad weather overnight, there was nowhere to store the plane other than outside, so … snow and freezing rain can hinder if the plane flies out the next day,” Mr. Lawrence said.
The hangars currently available at the Ogdensburg airport were made for smaller airplanes than Contour’s jets. Because of that, when a snow or ice storm hits, it can be difficult or impossible to deice the jet before taking off.
“When you get that much snow that quickly where you’re not at a big airport with multiple deice trucks, you can spend 45 minutes spraying the plane, then you have to go back and reload the truck while it continues snowing. It’s going to present some challenges,” Contour CEO Matt R. Chaifetz said.
He said Contour has now sent a second deice truck to Ogdensburg, the only airport they serve that has two of them.
He noted that a weather condition that’s “an automatic no-go for us” has also been an obstacle this year — freezing fog.
“It basically is a condition where … it just causes ice to accumulate so fast that even having previous deicer applied would not be sufficient” to safely fly, Mr. Chaifetz said.
Mr. Lawrence also noted that Ogdensburg can take advantage of a spare jet Contour stores in Philadelphia inside of a hangar.
“Contour has dedicated a spare aircraft in Philadelphia to fill not just ours, but any routes in the Northeast where if they have a mechanical issue with a jet, they can substitute a plane,” he said.
The OBPA director said cancellations are now on the decline as the weather shifts toward spring.
“The flight schedule has returned to normal in the last three weeks. With that we’ve had better weather,” Mr. Lawrence said.
“After the meeting, we both pledged to do as good a job as we can, also communicate to the public with cancellations and things like that,” Mr. Lawrence said. “The main thing is, we’re trying to build a long-term relationship with Contour as our air service provider. We want to be good partners, and we want to keep that relationship strong and up to date.”
“(The OBPA) have been great partners to work with. They’re understanding of some of the challenges unique to operating in that area. It’s a question of understanding what the challenges are and how we can collaborate to mitigate some of them going forward,” Mr. Chaifetz said.
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