24 January 2008

City only knows CYOW?

RockcliffeAirport06B How is it that the City of Ottawa's website directs visitors to only one airport, namely Macdonald-Cartier International airport? At the very least visitors to Ottawa should be told of the excellent non-airline airports serving the region, specifically Rockcliffe, Carp and Gatineau airports. As well there other more outlying aerodromes that could be useful to visitors, such as Embrun, Bearbrook, Carleton Place and Smith Falls to name a few. Not everyone that flies to Ottawa does so in an airliner. As it is many pilots land at Rockcliffe Airport to go to the Canada Aviation Museum.

Come on City of Ottawa staff point to all your city's valuable airport resources and reference them in the City of Ottawa's website.

Another area of the city's website that irks me is under Business / Transportation and Parking. It mentions Carp and Gatineau airports, ignoring Rockcliffe Airport. How can such an important airport be overlooked? To add insult to injury, the city's website points at an old email address for Carp. The correct address for carp is http://www.carp.ca, for email try mailto:info@carp.ca.

You can get information on all these aiports at the Canadian Owners and Pilots Associations "Places to Fly" website: http://www.copanational.org/PlacesToFly/

To see what I am talking about point your browser at these pages in the Ottawa's website:

http://www.ottawa.ca/visitors/index_en.html

http://www.ottawa.ca/visitors/destination_ottawa/index_en.html

http://www.ottawa.ca/business/transport/other_airports_en.html

3 comments:

david said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
david said...

Fortunately, the City of Ottawa doesn't own the web. Wikipedia has articles listing all airports (including GA) for many major urban areas, including Ottawa:

List of airports in the Ottawa area

Michael Shaw said...

Robert Manion from the City of Ottawa's Client Services and Public Information (CSPI) Branch reports,
Tel: (613)580-2424, ext. 28374
Email: Robert.Manion@ottawa.ca

"Thank you for email for the inclusion of th Ottawa-Rockcliffe Airport on our transportation and visitor pages on our Web site. We will be adding airport to the list of other area airports."

I am pleased with the city's response.

Michael Shaw