Canadian wildfire smoke grounds NMC flight training in Traverse City
Smoke from Canadian wildfires grounded NMC’s flight training at Cherry Capital Airport, sidelining 10 to 15 planes and delaying a key pilot pipeline.
Canadian wildfire smoke forced Northwestern Michigan College aviation instructors to ground all training flights at Cherry Capital Airport Wednesday morning, interrupting a program that normally sends about 10 to 15 planes into the air. The shutdown was set to last through Thursday and could stretch into Friday as smoke kept drifting across northern Michigan.
Alex Bloye, NMC’s director of aviation, said safety came first. Smoke can cut visibility and create health risks for student pilots, and the college’s aircraft are not pressurized like commercial airliners, so smoke can enter the cabin rather than being filtered out the same way. The grounding hit a hands-on program that begins flight training in the first semester and trains students year-round.
Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy issued a statewide air quality alert starting at midnight July 15 because of smoke from ongoing wildfires in Canada. State forecasters warned the event could last multiple days and push fine particulate pollution to unhealthy levels across parts of Michigan. The department monitors wildfire smoke, issues advisories and alerts, and tracks air quality impacts as conditions change.
Northwestern Michigan College’s aviation program is the only two-year college flight training program in Michigan and has carried a waitlist of up to two years. The college’s recent aviation expansion added eight planes to a fleet of 19 total aircraft inside a 33,530-square-foot hangar after a 16,500-square-foot addition, a project NMC said totaled $7 million with a $3.75 million state grant match. The college said the expansion would raise pilot-training capacity by 25% to 40%.
Kevin Kline, Cherry Capital Airport’s operations manager, said airport flights had not been affected as of Wednesday, so the smoke interruption was confined to NMC’s training operations for now. The program enrolls about 50 students a year and depends on steady flying conditions to move students from classroom work to the cockpit.
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