Pittsburgh

One route that I've forgotten to mention before (because I thought it had been dropped) is the SYR-Pittsburgh route which US Airways Express/Colgan Air flies with Saab-340's twice a day. This route and is leftover from the days when US Airways had a major hub in PIT and was once flown by mainline jets up to five times a day. Nowadays these 2 flights are the only ones from Upstate New York to PIT as Buffalo, Albany, and Rochester don't have any flights to PIT.
In an airport related event, a firefighter accidentally drove his SUV into the fire station at Syracuse Airport. No one was hurt but the building sustained major damage. http://www.9wsyr.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=94cb28c2-0a4b-427f-88dc-788f7c139037

Troop Deployment

A massive local troop deployment (the following is a caption from a picture that appeared in Monday's Post-Standard: Troops from NY Army National Gaurd 27th Brigade Combat team board a plane at 2:00AM at Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield, Fort Drum, NY, headed to Fort Bragg, NC, for training prior to deployment to Afghanistan.) overseas via Fort Bragg resulted seven flights (five ATA 757-200's and two Miami Air 737-800's) leaving from Fort Drum on Sunday to Pope Air Force Base near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. http://flightaware.com/live/airport/KGTB/departures

Fort Drum

Wheeler-Sack Army air field Airport at Fort Drum is located just to the east of Watertown and is part of the ever growing (in terms of troop numbers) Fort Drum. It is used for troop deployments and is home to a some army helicopters. Until the early 1990's it could only handle planes like the C-130 that didn't need a long runway and any larger planes had to land at Griffiss from where the men/cargo were either trucked or trained to/from Fort Drum. The current main 10,000 ft long runway eliminates that need. flightware's airport info page on Fort Drum has more info (http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/KGTB). Among the planes that land their on a regular basis are the giant An-124's that the military charters to ferry equipment overseas. Also planes of American Trans Air (ATA) and other charter carriers make regular appearances on troop flights. On a more somber note a Falcon 20 of Kalitta Charters flew into Fort Drum from Dover AFB on Saturday carrying the body of a local soldier killed in Iraq (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/KFS1399/history/20080112/1345Z/KDOV/KGTB).
On the subject of Griffiss, a Virgin America A319 flew into there on Thursday on delivery from Hamburg Germany, via Bangor Maine (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/VRD9526) for post-delivery maintenance before entering service.

First weekend of the new year

Things in the CNY aviation scene have been mostly quiet over the last few days. Last Wednesday a Frontier A319 ferried to Griffiss from Denver presumably for maintenance (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/FFT9924). Also a Beech 1900D registered to National Grid's Niagara Mohawk subsidiary recently ferried from Mena Intermountain Muni Airport (Mena, AR) to Syracuse (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N733DC). Mena Muni is a small airport in southwest Arkansas that according to aerial views (http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/KMEZ) seems to be home to a few maintenance operations for small airliners like Beech 1900's along with private jets like Learjets.