The Canadian Snowbirds may be showing off their airborne acrobatics in Terrace for the first time in 20 years.
During a presentation to council Feb. 11, organizer Steve Pereira asked for a letter of support from the city to submit as part of their application to the Snowbirds and One Canadian Air Division.
If approved, the event will take place at the Northwest Regional Airport on July 29, 2020, right before Riverboat Days. From Terrace, the Snowbirds would continue their touring schedule in Vanderhoof and then Abbotsford for three possible airshows in B.C.
“Terrace is the hub of the Northwest and we have an airport that has been newly renovated…[the runway] can host good quality airshows, there’s no reason why we can’t host them here,” Pereira says.
Terrace frequently held airshows between 1994 to 2000, but then experienced a four-year gap before the last airshow in 2004, which didn’t include the Snowbirds.
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Unsure of why there hadn’t been any shows organized since, Pereira says both him and Northwest Regional Airport manager Carman Hendry have been looking into bringing it back since last August.
It takes around two years just to confirm the Snowbirds alone, Pereira says.
“It’s a tricky thing, you have to talk to the right people — just sending an email is not going to get you to where you need to go,” he says, mentioning that he and Hendry attended an airshow trades event in Las Vegas last fall to establish face-to-face connections with key stakeholders.
“If we didn’t attend that trades show, I don’t think we would be here today.”
Both Carman and Pereira are now working to form a planning committee comprised primarily of airport staff to make the Terrace show a possibility.
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“That’s an airshow, when you have the Snowbirds — an iconic, nostalgic Canadian performance. That’s what we wanted to start with and we’ll just build from that,” he says. “Hopefully this is the first one of many if everything goes according to plan.”
Along with the Snowbirds, the show could see performances from the Canadian Army Sky Hawks Parachute Demo team, the One Canadian Air Division’s CF-18 Hornet Jet, the United States Airforce and others.
Pereira says he hopes to hear word on their application by this fall.
brittany@terracestandard.com
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