About This File
FS2004 Scenery--Fort Nelson CYYE in British Columbia, Canada. Fort Nelson is close to the Peace River in the northeast corner of British Columbia, around 70 miles from the northern border, 90 from the eastern border, and 80 miles east of the Rockies. The wartime construction of the Alaska Highway actually started from Fort Nelson, as there was already a road from Fort St John (which is close to Dawson Creek) north to Fort Nelson. The airfield was part of this construction effort and after the war-time ferrying of planes to Russia it was used by the US Army Air Force and then by the Canadian Air Force. Fort Nelson flourished with the oil and gas exploration of the 1950's and the following years, and this continued to grow until the collapse of the oil price in 2014. The town of Fort Nelson became the capital of the Northern Rockies Regional District when it (the District) was founded in 2009, and as a result the official name of the Fort Nelson airport is the Northern Rockies Regional Airport. The date for this scenery is around 2016, by which time the economic fortunes of the town were in decline. Five times per day flights by Central Mountain Air were starting to be reduced in number to the current (in 2022) one per day and none on Sunday; in the AI included here there are two flights per day. The main resident users of the airport are four helicopter companies, the helicopters presumably used for maintenance trips to whatever parts of the oil and gas fields that are still in use in the surrounding area. There are two runways, the main one is aligned 03-21, 6,400 feet long and 200 feet wide, with ILS at the southern end and PAPI at the northern. The second runway (a narrower rebuild on a previously existing runway) is aligned 07-25 and 77 feet wide, and is without any lights. These are the alignments as per the original build of FS9 and not as per the approximate 2016 date of the buildings; I had a problem at a very late stage in making this scenery which prevented me from continuing with some final details. On YouTube there is a series of posts by Angle of Attack showing the preparation and then the flight of an old Cessna 172 from Homer to Oshkosh for the installation of modern instruments. Interesting for me as they visit or fly over airfields I have made (Homer, Merrill, Tok Junction, Burwash, Silver City, Haines Junction, Watson Lake, Fort Nelson, and Grande Prairie) but in the winter so it all looks very different. Fort Nelson appears at 22 minutes into the video. By Roger Wensley.