When it comes to air travel, we here in Estevan tend to not think too much about it. However, Estevan does have an airport and they have some big plans on the go. We reached out to Douglas Reetz  Cheif Flight Instructor with Southeast Aviation to fill us in on the difficulties of operating an airport in the fridged temperatures and about what the Club has going on this year.

"Well, we have limitations on what temperatures we use on flight training and the operation of our airplanes of about -25, its what we normally use as our minimums, -30 with the wind chill. Its just for safety purposes, the airplanes will operate at colder temperatures but its just not as comfortable, for our purposes we try and keep the temperatures a little bit warmer to try and minimize the risk factor on the operation." 

One of the ways to beat the cold temperatures is to leave the cold behind and that's exactly what they did. Seven aircraft made a two week round trip to the Bahamas. Douglas Reetz piloted one of the aircraft that made that trip. Reetz

"Well it was a wonderful trip for all seven aircraft, we left here on the 19th of January and we went through customs at Minot, then down to Nebraska and on to Oklahoma and spent the night there, then went on to Mississippi then Georgia and made a stop in Florida where we overnighted then we jumped over to Marsh Harbor in the Bahama's then down to our final destination of kat island in the Bahamas. we spent about eight days there then retraced our steps on our way back home and made it back on the 31st of January." 

Mr.Reetz goes on to say that planning for the trip is not much different then planing for a car trip they still have to plan out all of there fuel stops and submit customs paperwork for crossing the international boundary. he also goes on to mention that they plan to make more of these trips in the future.

"Were actually going to be doing more of these trips, were planning one for northern Saskatchewan this summer sometime, were planning another winter time trip probably down to the Arizona area sometime this November/December. Then there's also other short trips were planning just to get people out using their airplanes and enjoying what the capabilities of flying private airplanes are."

If there's anyone who is interested in learning more about the Airport or learning how to fly, you can contact Southeast Aviation on their website https://southeastaviation.ca.