A local business owner says Port Hawkesbury’s airport hasn’t helped his business, but an Inverness airport might.
Lauchie MacLean, the president of Glenora Distilleries Ltd., says the Allan J. MacEachen Port Hawkesbury Airport can’t support growth of the region’s tourism industry if it can’t bring scheduled commercial flights to the area.
He says golf resorts can draw private air traffic, but most of tourism business owners in northern Inverness Co. can’t, so instead they rely on commercial travel.
MacLean tells The Hawk there’s an opportunity to grow the region as a tourism destination.
“All of a sudden, we’ve got a tourism cluster,” he says. “Let’s take it, let’s ride this possibility and this vision that we can actually have a great little tourism destination that you can fly in to.”
MacLean says the biggest barrier is a lack of commercial flights.
He says commercial travelers might not consider the region because of the eight-hour round trip from Halifax.
“When I travel anywhere in the world, I try to get as close to where I want to be, my final destination, as possible.”
MacLean says most vacationers don’t want to spend much of their limited vacation time travelling.
He says he doesn’t think an Inverness airport would stop air traffic to Port Hawkesbury.
“Port Hawkesbury has been there for, I believe, well over 40 years,” he says. “The traffic that it had between 1975 and 2015, I believe, nothing’s going to happen to that traffic.”
MacLean says Port Hawkesbury’s airport would lose private flights for golfing, but the infrastructure wouldn’t go anywhere.
He says it would still be there for emergency services and other private flights.
