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Cartierville Airport (ICAO: CYCV) was a historic airfield in the Saint-Laurent borough of Montreal, Quebec, that operated from 1911 until its closure in 1988. Once regarded as Canada's oldest continuously used flying field, it played a central role in early Canadian aviation and later in aircraft manufacturing before being redeveloped into a residential neighbourhood.
Cartierville Airport, known in its earliest years as Bois-Franc Field, was a long-serving airfield in Saint-Laurent, now a borough of Montreal, Quebec. It is of interest to the flight simulation pilot chiefly for its deep history rather than as an active destination, having hosted early Canadian airmail flights, wartime aircraft production, and the first flights of Canadair jet designs before its closure and redevelopment in the late 1980s.
The airfield lay in Saint-Laurent, adjacent to Route 117 (also known as Boulevard Marcel Laurin or Boulevard Laurentien), with its terminal buildings reached via Boulevard Henri-Bourassa, formerly Rue Bois Franc. It sat within the wider Montreal area and, in its later years, its operations were affected by the proximity of the busy Dorval Airport, whose traffic eventually made flight training and charter work at Cartierville increasingly hazardous. Recorded coordinates for the field are 49.2524, -121.946, at an elevation of 39 feet.
The field had a single hard-surfaced runway pair, 02/20, with runway 20 measuring 1964 feet and runway 02 measuring 1963 feet. There was no ILS.
The former site can be located with reference to Route 117 (Boulevard Marcel Laurin/Boulevard Laurentien) and Boulevard Henri-Bourassa, near the present-day Bois-Franc REM station, which now stands close to where the airport's terminal buildings once were.
The site began life before the First World War as the Bois-Franc Pologrounds and became an airfield in June 1911, initially known as Bois-Franc Field, a name retained through the First World War. In 1918, RAF pilot Captain Brian Peck flew Canada's first airmail flight from the field to Toronto's Leaside Field, carrying 120 letters. Aircraft manufacturing took root at Cartierville from 1928, when the Reid Aircraft Company, soon renamed Curtiss-Reid, opened a plant to build the Curtiss-Reid Rambler; Noorduyn followed with its own plant in 1935, and Canadian Vickers arrived in 1942. In its later decades the airfield was closely associated with Canadair, whose Plant One used the field to fly off completed CL-215 and CL-415 amphibians, Challenger business jets, and Canadair Regional Jets; the prototype Canadair CL-84 Dynavert tilt-wing VTOL aircraft was also test-flown there, and the first flight of the CL-600 Canadair Challenger took place from Cartierville on 8 November 1978. On 27 July 1960 a Pan Am Boeing 707 bound for Dorval mistakenly landed at Cartierville instead. An unusual operational feature of the airfield was a traffic light installed where the 10/28 runway's threshold ran close to what is now Boulevard Henri-Bourassa West, with Air Traffic Control stopping road traffic whenever an aircraft was about to take off from or land on that runway. By the 1980s, increasing air traffic from nearby Dorval Airport made it unsafe for private and charter flying and flight school operations to continue at Cartierville, and the field was closed to such traffic, leaving Bombardier, which had by then acquired Canadair, as the sole user. The airport was fully decommissioned in 1988 and the land redeveloped as the Bois-Franc residential neighbourhood.
Cartierville Airport has been closed since 1988 and no longer functions as an active aerodrome; the former airfield site has been redeveloped into the Bois-Franc neighbourhood of Saint-Laurent, Montreal, with no current flying operations, facilities, or public access for aircraft.
