Moosomin airport receives grant for automated weather observing system
May 4, 2026, 8:48 am
Nicole Taylor, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Moosomin Airport has been selected to receive a provincial Community Airport Partnership grant of up to $136,500 for an Automated Weather Observing System (AWOS).
An AWOS is a fully automated weather station that continuously measures critical aviation conditions such as wind speed and direction, temperature, visibility, cloud height, and precipitation.
Jeff St. Onge with the Moosomin Airport Committee says the AWOS system will make a big difference in terms of safety and pilots being able to land at the Moosomin airport.
“These systems run anywhere from $275,00 to $375,000 depending on what you put in,” he says. “The entry level system is $275,000 and there are two more things we’d like to add after that. One is measuring for thunderstorms, and the other is for freezing rain. Thunderstorms you can see on your radar, but nobody has something to detect the freezing rain.”
St. Onge explains how the AWOS system works.
“There doesn’t have to be any human intervention, it’s automated, and every hour on the hour, it’ will put out a report, and the report is available over the airwaves. So as a pilot, if you’re flying in, you’ll have a frequency and you will dial in to that frequency, and you’ll hear this continuous report. It will tell you ‘winds out of the north gusting at this of that angle, barometric pressure, or the clouds are at this height.
“It helps pilots to predict what weather they’re flying into. Also, one of the things that is incredibly important to a pilot is to know how high they are compared to the ground. And you do that on an airplane with an altimeter that you adjust to the barometric pressure, and it will tell you how high are. That keeps moving, and every time that dial moves your distance to the ground is impacted by it.
“They have to come down to 447 feet, and then either they can land or they can’t. If we have an AWOS, they come down to 250 feet. Why the difference? The difference is they have to use AWOS out of Yorkton, and then we pay a penalty. You pay a premium for every mile away from Yorkton you are. The further away they are, the bigger the penalties. So you want your AWOS as close as possible. So that’s why we need one here to get that minimum that we need.”
“There have been a number of times when we’ll have a flight that was unable to come in because the minimums were just too high,” says St. Onge. “In the last year and a half that I’ve been watching it, there have been a couple of flights that would have been able to come in, or would have had the potential to come in, because the a AWOS would have given us that other 200 feet that we’re missing. It will increase our availability, and it increases the pilot safety. Before they come, they already know what to expect. And sometimes it’s as simple as that safety net before you get here. There’s a saying in aviation—don’t fly anywhere you haven’t been five minutes ahead of time. It really does increase cockpit safety.”
St. Onge says that some other airports in the region, such as Virden and Yorkton have AWOS systems to assist pilots.
He says the plan is to have the AWOS system in place some time this summer.
“We’re putting together an RFP right now and then we’ll put that out on Sask Tenders. Let’s say that by the end of May, we’ve got our tender in place. We’ve got June, July, and August to put concrete in the ground and towers up.”
St. Onge says he was excited to hear that Moosomin received the CAPP grant for the system.
“I was absolutely, thrilled because the pilots will call me ahead of time, and they will ask what’s it like today and I do something called a runway condition report, and that’s something I can do relatively accurately, because I can drive out there, drive my vehicle up and down, tell them how slippery it is, what the snow is doing. But what I’m unable to do is tell them what the cloud ceiling is.
“So it really helps us out with running the airport.”
“It’s about lowering the minimums, and that increases the amount of flights that can come in and pilot safety.”
