No air show refunds despite major turbulence

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This article was published 05/06/2016 (3140 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The show took flight without a lot of disappointed people who turned around and went home after hours stuck on the tarmac, uh… highway.

The 2016 Manitoba Air Show was overwhelmed by 13,000 more people than organizers expected at Southport Airport south of Portage la Prairie Saturday. It was the first show at Southport since 2009.

Executive director Jill Oakes said volunteers running the event are still calculating the total, but she estimated there were about 18,000 people trying to get in. And people who left won’t be getting refunds, she said.

“Previously, air shows at Southport have attracted from 3,000 to 6,000 people, and we planned for 5,000 thinking children don’t even know what an air show is, they haven’t been to one, there hasn’t been one in Winnipeg or St. Andrews for 25 years, we have to educate people what an air show is before they’re interested in coming,” she said.

That clearly wasn’t the case. Fans of flight waited in lineups that began at the gate and ended some distance away on the Trans-Canada Highway. (Southport, a former Royal Canadian Air Force base, last held an air show in 2009. Air shows were held until 2004 at Winnipeg’s international airport.)

Kim Atamanchuk said her parents were among the frustrated people who left, along with with their combined Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gift of VIP tickets that cost Atamanchuk and her siblings $140.

“VIP tickets, to me, should mean guaranteed entry at least and that never happened,” she said, adding her parents were very disappointed.

“My dad is a plane buff,” she said. “You can imagine the look on his face when it was like, ‘Didn’t see a thing.’ He was really upset about missing the bombers. That was the big one.”

Atamanchuk said she thinks the air show should offer refunds to people who purchased tickets and wouldn’t have been able to get in until well after the event began.

“That’s not right to just collect the money,” she said. “If somebody did not get in and they pre-bought a ticket, you’re not entitled to that money.”

The CF Skyhawks took flight at about noon to kick off things. Oakes said lineups were so long that at about 3 p.m., in the middle of the event, organizers reduced ticket prices to $10 from $25 to get people through the gates faster. Shortly after that, she said they just let everyone through, whether they had a ticket or not.

“The show tickets are not refundable,” she said. “If they had not turned back, they actually could have gotten in.”

Aside from the large crowd that descended upon Southport, Oakes said everything went smoothly.

“It was actually amazing,” she said. “At the beginning of the show we thought it was going to get rained out because it was instrument flying-only weather. We figured, ‘No one’s going to come, the weather’s going to mess it up further.’ It already rained two or three days leading up to the show. We couldn’t believe it when the sun started coming out.”

Oakes said while the show was a success, organizers are looking at how to make admittance flow better next time. Plans are already in the works for an air show next year.

“We had a brief meeting on Sunday afternoon and one thing we were thinking is online tickets could be the only way of getting tickets so that we don’t have any surprises at the gate, that we have a really good idea of how many people are coming,” she said.

“Those people could be processed easily. We don’t have to make change. That took a lot of time — making change and explaining what the prices were.”

bailey.hildebrand@freepress.mb.ca