Nanaimo Airport guide

Nanaimo Airport sits in Cassidy, on the east side of Vancouver Island, on the Trans-Canada Highway corridor between Nanaimo and the Cowichan Valley. The site began as a Royal Canadian Air Force glider training field and wartime emergency airfield. The Department of National Defence bought the 522 acres from Thomas Cassidy in 1942, which gave the field its name.

The airport is a not-for-profit facility run by the Nanaimo Airport Commission, which took over management from Transport Canada in 1992 and bought the facility in 1994. Marketed as YCD and Vancouver Island Airport, it handled about 359,500 passengers and 24,587 aircraft movements in 2024. Scheduled flights connect to Vancouver, Calgary and Kelowna, with seasonal service to Edmonton.

The single runway, 16/34, is 2,012 m long. A 2009 project extended it and added an instrument landing system on runway 16, which is the only runway approved for instrument approaches. The terminal is named for First World War flying ace Raymond Collishaw, who was born in Nanaimo, and an expansion finished in 2020 raised passenger screening capacity from 100 to 1,000 people per hour.