Departure
95%
vs 95%
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Charlottetown Airport (CYYG), officially the Charlottetown Alexander B. Campbell Airport, lies a few miles north of Charlottetown in Sherwood, Prince Edward Island, and is the province's principal commercial gateway. For a VFR pilot it offers a pair of long, lit hard-surfaced runways, an ILS approach, and a history stretching back to the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan of the Second World War.
Charlottetown Airport, known locally as YYG and identified by the ICAO code CYYG, serves Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island, from a site at Sherwood just north of the city. It is owned by Transport Canada and operated by the Charlottetown Airport Authority, functioning as the island's only commercial airport with scheduled services from carriers such as Air Canada and WestJet. For a sim pilot the field is notable for its two substantial paved runways, ILS-equipped approach, and a layout and history that trace directly back to wartime pilot training.
The airport sits in Sherwood, Prince Edward Island, about 3 nautical miles north of downtown Charlottetown. It is classified as an airport of entry, with Canada Border Services Agency officers on hand for arriving flights within defined passenger limits.
Charlottetown has two paved, lit runways in a rough triangular layout, a legacy of its wartime construction. Runway 03/21 is 7,026 feet long, hard-surfaced, lit, and equipped with an ILS on runway 03. Runway 10/28 is 6,979 feet long, also hard-surfaced and lit, but without an instrument landing system.
Charlottetown provides an air-ground advisory frequency of 118 MHz. En-route and area traffic is worked by Moncton Centre on 135.65 MHz. The field elevation is 161 feet.
Aviation activity in the Charlottetown area began in 1912 with a landing at the exhibition grounds east of the city centre, but it was not until 1931 that a permanent airfield, Upton Field, was established northwest of the city on turf runways of 2,800 and 1,600 feet. Upton was used by Canadian Airways from 1932 to 1938 and hosted Canada's first air mail service, but was eventually rejected for expansion in favour of a new site at Sherwood Station on Brackley Point Road, purchased by the city government in 1938 for $30,000 with provincial financial backing. In December 1939 the city offered the new airport to the federal government for wartime use, and the Royal Canadian Air Force enlarged it and reconfigured the runways into the classic triangular pattern typical of British Commonwealth Air Training Plan aerodromes. The Royal Air Force operated from the field, then known as RCAF Station Charlottetown, from June 1941 until February 1944, after which RCAF training units took over until the base was decommissioned and returned to the Department of Transport on February 1, 1946. Postwar expansions included a new civilian terminal off Brackley Point Road and, during the 1960s and 1970s, the lengthening and realignment of runway 03/21 to accommodate jet aircraft. A further major expansion in the 1980s converted the old terminal into a general aviation facility, built a new terminal, control tower and emergency services building to the north, and brought runway 03/21 to its present length. The airport saw heavy scheduled service through the 1960s to 1990s from Air Canada and Eastern Provincial Airways, later continued by CP Air and Canadian Airlines, before the 1997 opening of the Confederation Bridge and improvements at Halifax and Moncton airports reshaped traffic patterns through Charlottetown. Operational control passed from Transport Canada to the newly formed Charlottetown Airport Authority on February 28, 1999.
Charlottetown continues to operate as Prince Edward Island's sole commercial airport, handling scheduled services alongside general aviation traffic. The site of the original wartime layout survives in the two long paved runways still in use today.
