417 King St W | 55 fl | Proposed

[jeffster]

Unsure why Waterloo Regional Airport flightpaths would be an issue here. It's about 8.5 KM from the edge of the runway, and not exactly a straight flightpath either.

In contrast, Billy Bishop in Toronto is 750 meters from tall buildings (not in the flightpath either).

Where I live is fairly close to the flightpath (as in a straight line), 9 KM roughly from airport, and at that point, the 737's are still fairly high in the air.

So, these commercial passenger airliners need to descend at a rate of at least 1,500 feet per minute minimum. They are travelling about 300 kph during that time. That works out to 5 km per minute. This means, if a passenger airplane were to descend over 417 King St West, its minimum distance from the ground would be 2,550 feet (minus 80 feet, see next (italics)) Even if we're generous with this build, say at 12' per floor, its height would be 660' (plus 80 feet elevation above the airport, as 417 King St is 1096 feet above sea, while the airport is at 1017 feet) or about 1,820 below the airlines flightpath. Again, those are minimums. An airline could be 2x the height and still be able to land safely.

You literally could build a duplicate CN Tower on that property and have zero interference on any airline.

It's not complicated math. Unsure how this is even an issue. Obviously someone complained and now they have to do their "due diligence" but damned if someone at City Hall can't figure that this isn't an issue, well, SMH.

Yeah it's certainly a strange situation, I couldn't find any logical reasoning behind it since it is no where near the AZR so I ended up asking a friend of mine who has their pilot license about why it's happening. The answer I got was that there must be a minimum of 500' of clearance between a plane and the tallest building in an area but generally 1000' is the minimum height to fly over any area, obviously there are exceptions like landing, sparsely populated areas, water, etc. All the building's we've had so far are shorter than 500' tall so it means that the restriction to the airspace is still below that 1000' mark, now this building, 50 Borden, Station Park Phase 3 are all over 500' tall meaning the minimum height to fly would then be above 1000' which requires NAVCAN to adjust all of their restrictions, with the restriction being then above 1000' it means that it could potentially push the restriction into a different class of airspace so NAVCAN basically has to verify that everything would still work.

Obviously that is just speculation from the knowledge of a pilot since they didn't have the flight restriction maps with them at that point but even they found it to be rather strange. However, it definitely seems like a reasonable justification for why NAVCAN is delaying it and could explain why none of the other projects over 50 floors have gotten approval yet. 50 Borden was original supposed to go to council in September but that never happened and it seems reasonable to think that NAVCAN is part of the reason for that as well (that is also much closer to the AZR).

And the funny thing about the Borden project - it's right beneath the flightpath. But as I said, for these large commercial planes, they have a minimum and maximum descend rate, 1500' per minute to 3,000' per minute. At that point, the airplane is about 7.5 km from landing and 1.5 minutes of travel time, it puts it at a minimum height of 2,250 feet, to a max of 4,500'. Again, almost enough for a CN Tower in that spot.

Due diligence, maybe? But this shouldn't be difficult to figure out.