Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone. There is still no word on who will replace Big Sky when they end their east coast operations next month. Big Sky itself which also has operations in Montana is being shut down entirely with it's western operations being taken over by Great Lakes. On the Griffiss front, an Air Transat A310 was ferried from Griffiss to Toronto a week ago on Saturday. Meanwhile a Gemini Air Cargo DC-10 was ferried to Griffiss from Miami on Wednesday (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/GCO4007). On the weather front Syracuse did have a white Christmas which didn't seem to impact airport operations much.

Bye Bye Big Sky

Big Sky will abandon the east coast and along with the flights from ART, OGS, MSS to BOS effective the middle of next month. This is apparently due to commercial reasons. The maintenance base at Watertown is also being closed down. Since these cities along with Plattsburgh and Saranac Lake are essential air service cities, the government is going to have to find another carrier to do these flights but how long this is going to take is an open question. If a new carrier can't be found immediately then Big Sky may be forced to continue these flights until a new carrier is found and is ready to take over.

Weekend snow storm

Syracuse and most of upstate New York got struck by a major weekend snow storm that resulted in Syracuse getting almost a foot of snow lasting from Sunday to late Monday. Syracuse Airport didn't shut down as a result of the storm but numerous flights were canceled/delayed by the storm. In other news, USA 3000 and a few A320 maintenance flights in and out of Griffiss with 2 of these routing from Europe (exactly where is unknown) stopping at Keflavik Iceland before continuing onto Syracuse for US customs clearance and then to Rome. Also the Albany-Watertown route that's operated by Big Sky is being dropped due to commercial reasons.

12/11/07

The aviation scene in Central New York has been relatively quiet over the last week. The exception was Griffiss which had some maintenance movements over the last few days. One of them was the Sunday arrival of a USA 3000 A320 from Baltimore (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/GWY7266). Another was an Air Transat A330-200 departure to Toronto (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/TSC85). One thing that I've noticed is the for the past week Wiggins Airways which operates as a FedEx Feeder, has been sending a Cessna Caravan from Syracuse to Ogdensburg every week night (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/WIG7411/history), which they usually don't. I think that this has something to the with the holidays and extra demand which FedEx and the other s like UPS usually handle.

Ogdensburg and Massena

Ogdensburg and Massena New York are two smaller cities located to the northeast of Watertown along the St. Lawrence River. They each have a small airfield with short runways that are served by Big Sky/Delta Connection Beech 1900D's as part of the Essential air service program. Flights from their OGS and MSS are shared with Watertown and continue onto Boston. the website for Massena airport is: http://www.massenaworks.com/town/airport.asp. That for Ogdensburg is http://www.ogdensport.com/airport.html.

Icy Night

It was very icy in Syracuse last night and the airport wasn't spared the trouble caused by it. A Jetblue A320 coming in from Orlando at 10pm last night (Sunday night) had difficulties on landing that required it to be towed to the terminal. This process took 2 hours due to difficulties with tow truck due to the ice. Also the gate equipment was iced up so the passengers weren't deplaned till midnight. A news report on this incident can be seen a 9WSYR's website (http://www.9wsyr.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=6eb9dba3-82ed-4cc2-9f80-5955b4d78696).
The bad weather didn't stop Syracuse University's Women's Basketball team from returning from their win at Louisiana-Monroe (http://athletics.syr.edu/News/basketball/wbasket/2007/12/2/wbbULM120207.asp?path=wbasket) and (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/BTA1351/history/20071203/0226Z/KMLU/KSYR).
The bad weather did cause one diversion, an American Eagle flight from Chicago-O'Hare to Syracuse which spent an hour on the ground in Rochester (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/EGF906/history).

Snowy Weekend

This weekend was a very snowy one in Syracuse. Despite the snow there were some charter flights with one of them being an atlantic city gambling charter in the form of a Sky King 737-200 (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/SGB326/history) which also flew from Griffiss to Atlantic City and back. There was also an Express Jet Emb-145 charter (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/BTA1353/history/20071130/2118Z/KSYR/KMLU) to Monroe, Louisiana which carried the Syracuse University Women's Basketball team to play Eastern Kentucky on Saturday (they won that game). They're due home after playing Louisiana-Monroe in the championship game on Sunday (the result of this game is unknown at the this entry is added). Normally the basketball teams because they aren't as large as the football teams, they fly normal commercial flights but this case Monroe doesn't have too many flights so they chartered a plane to make sure the entire team gets there. Griffiss also saw some maintenance related activity with a few planes coming and going. One of them was a Boeing 767-200 that left Griffiss for Atlanta and then flew to Miami the next day (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N608UA). There was also a Canjet Boeing 737-500 that flew into Griffiss from Burlington, VT and Quebec City, QC (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/CJA9900) (the stop at Burlington was probably for customs clearance since Griffiss has no customs facilities).