--- title: "Mirabel Airport: Montreal's Aviation Disaster" description: "In this story, we explore the rise and fall of Montreal's Mirabel Airport, a tale that stands as a stark reminder of how grand visions can sometimes lead to monumental failures. Conceived in the late 1960s, Mirabel was destined to be the crowning jewel of Canadian aviation, a futuristic hub that would handle the ever-growing influx of air traffic and serve as a beacon of modernity and efficiency.\n\nYet what unfolded was a narrative of miscalculation and misfortune. Despite its state-of-the-art design and sprawling size, Mirabel quickly descended into a quagmire of logistical challenges and unfulfilled promises. Isolated from the heart of Montreal, burdened by inadequate transportation links, and overshadowed by the already established Dorval Airport, Mirabel's dream of becoming a central aviation hub soon dissipated into the air of disappointment.\n\n## A City on the Rise Needs a Bigger Airport\n\nIn the 1960s, the city of Montreal began experiencing quite the economic boom. Complementing this growing economy was a rapidly expanding infrastructure, including the Montreal Metro. The number of visitors to the city was also climbing every year, especially since, at the time, Montreal was the only possible Canadian destination for European airlines.\n\nAll of this meant that Montreal's existing airport, Dorval, was being hit with an estimated 20% increase in airline traffic every year, and there was a fear that it would soon be overcrowded. The airport would clearly need to be expanded.\n\nThe problem was that there isn't a ton of room to expand Dorval. On one half it's bordered by the city of Montreal, and on the other half it's bordered by water: Lake St. Louis and the St. Lawrence River. Seeing this, planners decided that the best course of action was to build an entirely new airport outside the crowded city limits, so that it could be made as large as possible.\n\n## Choosing a Site: Politics Over Practicality\n\nThe Canadian Department of Transportation began investigating locations for this new airport, narrowing the field down to five places. The federal government preferred a location at Vaudreuil-Dorion, to the west of Montreal. The reasoning was that this spot would also be fairly close to Ottawa and could become the perfect international gateway to both important cities. Vaudreuil-Dorion was also attractive because it was already well connected by roads and railways, meaning lots of basic infrastructure was already in place and simply needed to be expanded to allow for construction.\n\nHowever, Quebec's Premier didn't like this option. Not really for any practical reasons, but simply because he didn't want such an important project being built so close to the border with Ontario. Instead, he proposed the new airport be constructed in the opposite direction, in Drummondville.\n\nThe federal and provincial governments went back and forth for a while before finally negotiating an agreement on where to put the new airport: the village of Sainte-Scholastique.\n\n## The Grandest Vision in the World\n\nNow that a location had finally been agreed upon, the huge vision for the airport began to come together. For starters, it was going to be absolutely massive, covering 97,000 acres, about the same size as the entire city of Montreal itself, which would also make it the world's largest airport by area.\n\nAt the beginning of construction, there were only two major highways leading to the site, so a third and fourth were planned, along with a high-speed urban rail transit system that would not only carry passengers back toward the major cities but would even connect directly into the Montreal Metro for quick and easy transportation. The airport, and the city next to it, were named Mirabel, and all things considered, it was on the fast track to becoming Canada's most important airport and a hub of transportation and industry.\n\nConstruction began in 1969, but this wasn't a project that could drag on for too long. Coming up in 1976 were the Montreal Summer Olympics, the perfect opportunity to jump-start Mirabel's new life, so the new infrastructure needed to be set up as soon as possible. But, as you can probably guess from the title, these grand ambitions soon crumbled into catastrophe.\n\n## Wrong Place, Wrong Time\n\nThe problems with Mirabel began with the public response, which was mostly negative, especially among the people living on the land that was about to be turned into the airport. The government expropriated all the required property, essentially kicking everyone out of their homes. Yes, these people were compensated, but they were rightfully upset, as their entire community was basically bulldozed overnight.\n\nTo make matters even more infuriating for them, the massive amount of land that was expropriated wouldn't even be put to full use. Many of the grandiose plans for Mirabel were significantly downscaled later in the planning phase, resulting in the airport and its runways only taking up 19% of the entire property. The rest, the government claimed, would be used as a sound buffer and, in the future, possibly turned into an industrial center. This downgrade made many former residents feel like their lives had been completely uprooted for no reason.\n\nThe next problem involved the plans for the urban rail system. It was to be called T.R.R.A.M.M., and it was intended to reach speeds of 160 kilometers per hour, or 100 miles per hour. The idea was that it would not only take passengers from the airport to the edge of Montreal, but would eventually be expanded to serve other routes around and throughout the city.\n\nThe problem was that T.R.R.A.M.M. was going to be very expensive, and nobody could seem to gather the necessary funds to get it going. It was decided that the rail system would have to be completed at a later date, and in the meantime a fleet of buses would be used to ferry passengers to and from the site.\n\n## A Half-Built Airport Opens for Business\n\nThough by now significantly smaller than originally planned, Mirabel was officially completed in late 1975, just in time for the Olympics the following year. Instead of the planned six runways and six terminals, it opened with just one terminal and two runways. Despite the downgrades, its final cost was still an estimated $500 million, equivalent to nearly $3 billion today.\n\nAnd even though it was far less capable than intended, it was already time to begin shifting air traffic away from Dorval and into the new Mirabel. Estimates were that within a few years, 20 million annual passengers would be landing in Montreal, and the hope was to route 17 million of them through Mirabel.\n\nTo get this transition started, it was announced that all major flights, especially those from Europe, were now required to travel through Mirabel. The only exceptions were domestic flights and a select few from the United States, which would be transitioned to Mirabel later, in 1982.\n\n## Why Nobody Wanted to Fly to Mirabel\n\nIt soon became apparent that this mass transition wasn't going to be necessary. Remember, the whole justification for the new airport was the belief that Dorval would soon become overcrowded, but that isn't what happened at all. In fact, in the years immediately after Mirabel's construction, air traffic to Montreal actually began to decline. There were a few reasons for this.\n\nThe first was the distance from the airport to Montreal itself. Building an airport far outside city limits is not a novel concept; it's used widely around the world for space reasons. Going from Munich International Airport into Munich itself takes around 25 minutes, a similar time to the trip passengers face traveling from Boryspil Airport into Kyiv.\n\nIt's only a minor inconvenience at most airports, but Mirabel took it to a new level. Because the ambitious rail system was never going to be functional, passengers were forced to take an hour-long bus ride to get back to civilization, and that's only if traffic was good, obviously the last thing anyone wants to do after an uncomfortable transatlantic flight.\n\nAdd to this that because most domestic flights were still being handled by the other airport, you now had a second layer of inconvenience added to your travel. Imagine a European tourist traveling to Ottawa. Instead of a standard, direct flight from Paris to Ottawa taking eight or nine hours, the tourist takes a transatlantic flight to Mirabel, then has to take an hour-long bus ride to Dorval, and only then gets to catch a connecting flight into Ottawa. A completely unnecessary complication, adding a few hours of total travel, caused a lot of would-be tourists to avoid Montreal entirely and instead spend their trips somewhere less of a hassle, like Toronto or the United States.\n\nThen, to make matters even worse, aircraft technology made great strides in fuel efficiency throughout the 1970s, leading to commercial jets that could fly much farther without needing to refuel. This meant that a lot of jets that used to stop in Montreal to fill their tanks before crossing the ocean could now skip it entirely, taking away even more expected traffic.\n\n## The Numbers Tell the Story\n\nBy 1991, instead of the expected 20-plus million, Mirabel and Dorval combined were only handling 8 million passengers. Mirabel never managed to take in more than 3 million in a single year. Compare this with Toronto, which by this point was handling more than 18 million a year.\n\nLots of airlines had completely shifted focus to Toronto and largely abandoned flights to Montreal, which had fallen to second place in terms of Canadian air traffic. Then Vancouver overtook it. Then even Calgary did. Montreal had fallen to fourth place.\n\nRealizing that the city was taking too much of an economic hit by keeping Mirabel on life support, in 1997 it was announced that Dorval would resume normal operations. The dream had failed, and Mirabel turned out to be nothing more than a $500 million mistake.\n\n## The Slow Decline\n\nAs airlines shifted back to Dorval, the traffic through Mirabel plummeted, and the city of Mirabel suffered as a result. The massive Château Aéroport-Mirabel, which had been built in the 1970s in the hopes of catching the would-be millions of arriving passengers, shut down in 2002 due to lack of business. In 2004, just 29 years after its opening, the last passenger aircraft took off from Mirabel, and ever since the airport has only been used for cargo and private flights.\n\nWith so much empty space in its terminal, new uses started popping up, such as a movie set or a backdrop for music video shoots. Not bad, but pretty disappointing for an airport that was supposed to be the most important in the entire country. Later, Mirabel was in talks to be turned into a giant amusement park by a company linked to the then Lebanese prime minister and billionaire Rafic Hariri, but these negotiations fell through, probably because he was assassinated in 2005.\n\nSeeing that the huge space wasn't going to be put to much use, in 2006 Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that he would be returning expropriated land to 125 farmers, an act he called \"correcting a historical injustice.\" The move was met with a lot of public support, but it was also a reminder of the land that had been taken for nothing. In hindsight, many critics pointed out that opting to run both airports simultaneously is what ultimately led to Mirabel never taking off.\n\nAnd many are disappointed that it never did. If Dorval had been completely shut down as originally intended, not only would Mirabel have had a better chance of rising to stardom, but the space the old airport occupied inside Montreal could have been used for a variety of purposes, such as parks.\n\nBut that never happened. Instead, Dorval received an expansion in 2000 once it became clear that Mirabel was a failure, reaffirming the original airport's status as the sole gateway to Montreal.\n\nIn fact, Mirabel was losing so much money every year that in 2014, authorities decided to finally demolish the main terminal building. It was providing no benefit while continuing to require maintenance costs. Over the previous decade, it had cost $30 million to maintain, meaning that the $10 million price tag for its demolition was certainly worth the bill.\n\n## A Quiet Second Life\n\nAs disastrous as this whole story has been, there is a bit of a positive ending. Between 2008 and 2018, air traffic at Mirabel began to recover in an interesting way, tripling over the 10-year period. Passenger flights never returned, but what suddenly boosted its business was an increase in cargo flights, private jets, helicopters, and use of the runways by nearby flight schools. Other events are held at the airport and on the runways as well, such as Canadian NASCAR.\n\nThen, in 2020, it found a new purpose as a flight service station, and air traffic control now works there 16 hours a day, monitoring nearly 100,000 movements every year.\n\nStill, it is far from the glory that was imagined for it back in the 1960s. Regardless of what event it is hosting, Mirabel Airport will forever stand as a warning, a somber display of the consequences of hasty, expensive investments, and a forever reminder not to let ambitions exceed one's budget.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Mirabel was conceived in the late 1960s to relieve a feared overcrowding crisis at Dorval and was planned to be the world's largest airport by area, covering 97,000 acres.\n- Political wrangling between federal and provincial governments shifted the site to Sainte-Scholastique, and the grand plans were heavily downscaled, with runways using just 19% of the expropriated land.\n- The promised high-speed T.R.R.A.M.M. rail link was never funded, leaving arriving passengers with an hour-long bus ride to the city, only if traffic cooperated.\n- The expected traffic never came: declining Montreal traffic, the inconvenience of splitting domestic flights to Dorval, and more fuel-efficient jets that no longer needed to refuel all conspired against the airport.\n- Mirabel never handled more than 3 million passengers in a year; flights were consolidated back at Dorval starting in 1997, the last passenger plane left in 2004, and the terminal was demolished in 2014.\n- After 2008, cargo flights, private jets, flight schools, events, and a 2020 flight service station role gave Mirabel a quieter second life monitoring nearly 100,000 movements a year.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Why was Mirabel Airport built in the first place?\n\nIn the 1960s, Montreal was booming, and its only airport, Dorval, was facing an estimated 20% increase in air traffic each year, raising fears it would soon be overcrowded. Dorval couldn't easily expand because it was hemmed in by the city on one side and water on the other. Planners decided the solution was to build a much larger airport outside the city limits.\n\n### How big was Mirabel supposed to be?\n\nThe site covered 97,000 acres, about the same area as the entire city of Montreal, making it the world's largest airport by area at the time. The original vision called for six runways and six terminals. However, the plans were heavily downscaled, and it opened with just one terminal and two runways, with the airport and runways occupying only 19% of the expropriated land.\n\n### Why did Mirabel fail?\n\nSeveral factors combined against it. The airport was far from Montreal with no functioning rail link, forcing passengers onto hour-long bus rides; domestic flights stayed at Dorval, creating awkward connections; Montreal's air traffic declined rather than grew; and more fuel-efficient jets no longer needed to stop in Montreal to refuel. Mirabel never handled more than 3 million passengers in a single year.\n\n### What was the T.R.R.A.M.M. and what happened to it?\n\nT.R.R.A.M.M. was the planned high-speed urban rail system intended to connect Mirabel to the edge of Montreal at speeds of 160 kilometers per hour (100 mph), eventually linking into the Montreal Metro. It proved too expensive, and no one could gather the funds to build it. It was deferred indefinitely, and buses were used instead, a major reason the airport was so inconvenient.\n\n### How much did Mirabel cost and was it worth it?\n\nEven after being scaled down, Mirabel cost an estimated $500 million, equivalent to nearly $3 billion today. Given that it never came close to its passenger targets and was ultimately abandoned for commercial flights, the script frames it as a $500 million mistake. The terminal even cost $30 million to maintain over its final decade before being demolished for $10 million in 2014.\n\n### What is Mirabel used for today?\n\nPassenger flights never returned, but between 2008 and 2018 the airport's traffic tripled thanks to cargo flights, private jets, helicopters, and nearby flight schools, along with events like Canadian NASCAR. In 2020 it became a flight service station, with air traffic control operating 16 hours a day and monitoring nearly 100,000 movements per year.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original MegaProjects video: Montreal's Mirabel Airport: A Disaster from Start to Finish](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2obvZ0pLRjc)\n- [Montréal–Mirabel International Airport — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montr%C3%A9al%E2%80%93Mirabel_International_Airport)\n- [Montreal-Mirabel International Airport — The Canadian Encyclopedia](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/montreal-mirabel-international-airport)\n- [Expropriated Mirabel land to be returned — CBC News](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/expropriated-mirabel-land-to-be-returned-1.605698)\n\n- [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NKN-2007-08-05_144714_MIRABEL_AIRPORT(Yvan_Leduc_author_for_Wikipedia).Jpg) by Yvan Leduc / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.\n\n## Related Coverage\n\n- [The Laerdal Tunnel: The Longest Road Tunnel in the World](/article/laerdal-tunnel-longest-road-tunnel-world)\n\n- [What If Boeing's Passenger Jets Were Forced Offline?](/article/what-if-boeings-passenger-jets-were-forced-offline)\n\n- [The Ford Model T: A Revolutionary Car With a Terrible Dark Side](/article/ford-model-t-revolutionary-and-terrible-legacy)" url: https://megaprojects.pub/article/montreal-mirabel-airport-disaster.md canonical: https://megaprojects.pub/article/montreal-mirabel-airport-disaster datePublished: 2026-06-09 dateModified: 2026-06-09 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://megaprojects.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: MegaProjects image: https://media.megaprojects.pub/articles/2obvZ0pLRjc/hero.jpg type: Article contentHash: 4512d0bc990c68e4defcff78c740fa95a7ffb87c24f31d5dd8bf63cdfd75ee32 tokens: 4538 summaryUrl: https://megaprojects.pub/article/montreal-mirabel-airport-disaster.md.summary.md --- In this story, we explore the rise and fall of Montreal's Mirabel Airport, a tale that stands as a stark reminder of how grand visions can sometimes lead to monumental failures. Conceived in the late 1960s, Mirabel was destined to be the crowning jewel of Canadian aviation, a futuristic hub that would handle the ever-growing influx of air traffic and serve as a beacon of modernity and efficiency. Yet what unfolded was a narrative of miscalculation and misfortune. Despite its state-of-the-art design and sprawling size, Mirabel quickly descended into a quagmire of logistical challenges and unfulfilled promises. Isolated from the heart of Montreal, burdened by inadequate transportation links, and overshadowed by the already established Dorval Airport, Mirabel's dream of becoming a central aviation hub soon dissipated into the air of disappointment. ## A City on the Rise Needs a Bigger Airport In the 1960s, the city of Montreal began experiencing quite the economic boom. Complementing this growing economy was a rapidly expanding infrastructure, including the Montreal Metro. The number of visitors to the city was also climbing every year, especially since, at the time, Montreal was the only possible Canadian destination for European airlines. All of this meant that Montreal's existing airport, Dorval, was being hit with an estimated 20% increase in airline traffic every year, and there was a fear that it would soon be overcrowded. The airport would clearly need to be expanded. The problem was that there isn't a ton of room to expand Dorval. On one half it's bordered by the city of Montreal, and on the other half it's bordered by water: Lake St. Louis and the St. Lawrence River. Seeing this, planners decided that the best course of action was to build an entirely new airport outside the crowded city limits, so that it could be made as large as possible. ## Choosing a Site: Politics Over Practicality The Canadian Department of Transportation began investigating locations for this new airport, narrowing the field down to five places. The federal government preferred a location at Vaudreuil-Dorion, to the west of Montreal. The reasoning was that this spot would also be fairly close to Ottawa and could become the perfect international gateway to both important cities. Vaudreuil-Dorion was also attractive because it was already well connected by roads and railways, meaning lots of basic infrastructure was already in place and simply needed to be expanded to allow for construction. However, Quebec's Premier didn't like this option. Not really for any practical reasons, but simply because he didn't want such an important project being built so close to the border with Ontario. Instead, he proposed the new airport be constructed in the opposite direction, in Drummondville. The federal and provincial governments went back and forth for a while before finally negotiating an agreement on where to put the new airport: the village of Sainte-Scholastique. ## The Grandest Vision in the World Now that a location had finally been agreed upon, the huge vision for the airport began to come together. For starters, it was going to be absolutely massive, covering 97,000 acres, about the same size as the entire city of Montreal itself, which would also make it the world's largest airport by area. At the beginning of construction, there were only two major highways leading to the site, so a third and fourth were planned, along with a high-speed urban rail transit system that would not only carry passengers back toward the major cities but would even connect directly into the Montreal Metro for quick and easy transportation. The airport, and the city next to it, were named Mirabel, and all things considered, it was on the fast track to becoming Canada's most important airport and a hub of transportation and industry. Construction began in 1969, but this wasn't a project that could drag on for too long. Coming up in 1976 were the Montreal Summer Olympics, the perfect opportunity to jump-start Mirabel's new life, so the new infrastructure needed to be set up as soon as possible. But, as you can probably guess from the title, these grand ambitions soon crumbled into catastrophe. ## Wrong Place, Wrong Time The problems with Mirabel began with the public response, which was mostly negative, especially among the people living on the land that was about to be turned into the airport. The government expropriated all the required property, essentially kicking everyone out of their homes. Yes, these people were compensated, but they were rightfully upset, as their entire community was basically bulldozed overnight. To make matters even more infuriating for them, the massive amount of land that was expropriated wouldn't even be put to full use. Many of the grandiose plans for Mirabel were significantly downscaled later in the planning phase, resulting in the airport and its runways only taking up 19% of the entire property. The rest, the government claimed, would be used as a sound buffer and, in the future, possibly turned into an industrial center. This downgrade made many former residents feel like their lives had been completely uprooted for no reason. The next problem involved the plans for the urban rail system. It was to be called T.R.R.A.M.M., and it was intended to reach speeds of 160 kilometers per hour, or 100 miles per hour. The idea was that it would not only take passengers from the airport to the edge of Montreal, but would eventually be expanded to serve other routes around and throughout the city. The problem was that T.R.R.A.M.M. was going to be very expensive, and nobody could seem to gather the necessary funds to get it going. It was decided that the rail system would have to be completed at a later date, and in the meantime a fleet of buses would be used to ferry passengers to and from the site. ## A Half-Built Airport Opens for Business Though by now significantly smaller than originally planned, Mirabel was officially completed in late 1975, just in time for the Olympics the following year. Instead of the planned six runways and six terminals, it opened with just one terminal and two runways. Despite the downgrades, its final cost was still an estimated $500 million, equivalent to nearly $3 billion today. And even though it was far less capable than intended, it was already time to begin shifting air traffic away from Dorval and into the new Mirabel. Estimates were that within a few years, 20 million annual passengers would be landing in Montreal, and the hope was to route 17 million of them through Mirabel. To get this transition started, it was announced that all major flights, especially those from Europe, were now required to travel through Mirabel. The only exceptions were domestic flights and a select few from the United States, which would be transitioned to Mirabel later, in 1982. ## Why Nobody Wanted to Fly to Mirabel It soon became apparent that this mass transition wasn't going to be necessary. Remember, the whole justification for the new airport was the belief that Dorval would soon become overcrowded, but that isn't what happened at all. In fact, in the years immediately after Mirabel's construction, air traffic to Montreal actually began to decline. There were a few reasons for this. The first was the distance from the airport to Montreal itself. Building an airport far outside city limits is not a novel concept; it's used widely around the world for space reasons. Going from Munich International Airport into Munich itself takes around 25 minutes, a similar time to the trip passengers face traveling from Boryspil Airport into Kyiv. It's only a minor inconvenience at most airports, but Mirabel took it to a new level. Because the ambitious rail system was never going to be functional, passengers were forced to take an hour-long bus ride to get back to civilization, and that's only if traffic was good, obviously the last thing anyone wants to do after an uncomfortable transatlantic flight. Add to this that because most domestic flights were still being handled by the other airport, you now had a second layer of inconvenience added to your travel. Imagine a European tourist traveling to Ottawa. Instead of a standard, direct flight from Paris to Ottawa taking eight or nine hours, the tourist takes a transatlantic flight to Mirabel, then has to take an hour-long bus ride to Dorval, and only then gets to catch a connecting flight into Ottawa. A completely unnecessary complication, adding a few hours of total travel, caused a lot of would-be tourists to avoid Montreal entirely and instead spend their trips somewhere less of a hassle, like Toronto or the United States. Then, to make matters even worse, aircraft technology made great strides in fuel efficiency throughout the 1970s, leading to commercial jets that could fly much farther without needing to refuel. This meant that a lot of jets that used to stop in Montreal to fill their tanks before crossing the ocean could now skip it entirely, taking away even more expected traffic. ## The Numbers Tell the Story By 1991, instead of the expected 20-plus million, Mirabel and Dorval combined were only handling 8 million passengers. Mirabel never managed to take in more than 3 million in a single year. Compare this with Toronto, which by this point was handling more than 18 million a year. Lots of airlines had completely shifted focus to Toronto and largely abandoned flights to Montreal, which had fallen to second place in terms of Canadian air traffic. Then Vancouver overtook it. Then even Calgary did. Montreal had fallen to fourth place. Realizing that the city was taking too much of an economic hit by keeping Mirabel on life support, in 1997 it was announced that Dorval would resume normal operations. The dream had failed, and Mirabel turned out to be nothing more than a $500 million mistake. ## The Slow Decline As airlines shifted back to Dorval, the traffic through Mirabel plummeted, and the city of Mirabel suffered as a result. The massive Château Aéroport-Mirabel, which had been built in the 1970s in the hopes of catching the would-be millions of arriving passengers, shut down in 2002 due to lack of business. In 2004, just 29 years after its opening, the last passenger aircraft took off from Mirabel, and ever since the airport has only been used for cargo and private flights. With so much empty space in its terminal, new uses started popping up, such as a movie set or a backdrop for music video shoots. Not bad, but pretty disappointing for an airport that was supposed to be the most important in the entire country. Later, Mirabel was in talks to be turned into a giant amusement park by a company linked to the then Lebanese prime minister and billionaire Rafic Hariri, but these negotiations fell through, probably because he was assassinated in 2005. Seeing that the huge space wasn't going to be put to much use, in 2006 Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that he would be returning expropriated land to 125 farmers, an act he called "correcting a historical injustice." The move was met with a lot of public support, but it was also a reminder of the land that had been taken for nothing. In hindsight, many critics pointed out that opting to run both airports simultaneously is what ultimately led to Mirabel never taking off. And many are disappointed that it never did. If Dorval had been completely shut down as originally intended, not only would Mirabel have had a better chance of rising to stardom, but the space the old airport occupied inside Montreal could have been used for a variety of purposes, such as parks. But that never happened. Instead, Dorval received an expansion in 2000 once it became clear that Mirabel was a failure, reaffirming the original airport's status as the sole gateway to Montreal. In fact, Mirabel was losing so much money every year that in 2014, authorities decided to finally demolish the main terminal building. It was providing no benefit while continuing to require maintenance costs. Over the previous decade, it had cost $30 million to maintain, meaning that the $10 million price tag for its demolition was certainly worth the bill. ## A Quiet Second Life As disastrous as this whole story has been, there is a bit of a positive ending. Between 2008 and 2018, air traffic at Mirabel began to recover in an interesting way, tripling over the 10-year period. Passenger flights never returned, but what suddenly boosted its business was an increase in cargo flights, private jets, helicopters, and use of the runways by nearby flight schools. Other events are held at the airport and on the runways as well, such as Canadian NASCAR. Then, in 2020, it found a new purpose as a flight service station, and air traffic control now works there 16 hours a day, monitoring nearly 100,000 movements every year. Still, it is far from the glory that was imagined for it back in the 1960s. Regardless of what event it is hosting, Mirabel Airport will forever stand as a warning, a somber display of the consequences of hasty, expensive investments, and a forever reminder not to let ambitions exceed one's budget. ## Key Takeaways - Mirabel was conceived in the late 1960s to relieve a feared overcrowding crisis at Dorval and was planned to be the world's largest airport by area, covering 97,000 acres. - Political wrangling between federal and provincial governments shifted the site to Sainte-Scholastique, and the grand plans were heavily downscaled, with runways using just 19% of the expropriated land. - The promised high-speed T.R.R.A.M.M. rail link was never funded, leaving arriving passengers with an hour-long bus ride to the city, only if traffic cooperated. - The expected traffic never came: declining Montreal traffic, the inconvenience of splitting domestic flights to Dorval, and more fuel-efficient jets that no longer needed to refuel all conspired against the airport. - Mirabel never handled more than 3 million passengers in a year; flights were consolidated back at Dorval starting in 1997, the last passenger plane left in 2004, and the terminal was demolished in 2014. - After 2008, cargo flights, private jets, flight schools, events, and a 2020 flight service station role gave Mirabel a quieter second life monitoring nearly 100,000 movements a year. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Why was Mirabel Airport built in the first place? In the 1960s, Montreal was booming, and its only airport, Dorval, was facing an estimated 20% increase in air traffic each year, raising fears it would soon be overcrowded. Dorval couldn't easily expand because it was hemmed in by the city on one side and water on the other. Planners decided the solution was to build a much larger airport outside the city limits. ### How big was Mirabel supposed to be? The site covered 97,000 acres, about the same area as the entire city of Montreal, making it the world's largest airport by area at the time. The original vision called for six runways and six terminals. However, the plans were heavily downscaled, and it opened with just one terminal and two runways, with the airport and runways occupying only 19% of the expropriated land. ### Why did Mirabel fail? Several factors combined against it. The airport was far from Montreal with no functioning rail link, forcing passengers onto hour-long bus rides; domestic flights stayed at Dorval, creating awkward connections; Montreal's air traffic declined rather than grew; and more fuel-efficient jets no longer needed to stop in Montreal to refuel. Mirabel never handled more than 3 million passengers in a single year. ### What was the T.R.R.A.M.M. and what happened to it? T.R.R.A.M.M. was the planned high-speed urban rail system intended to connect Mirabel to the edge of Montreal at speeds of 160 kilometers per hour (100 mph), eventually linking into the Montreal Metro. It proved too expensive, and no one could gather the funds to build it. It was deferred indefinitely, and buses were used instead, a major reason the airport was so inconvenient. ### How much did Mirabel cost and was it worth it? Even after being scaled down, Mirabel cost an estimated $500 million, equivalent to nearly $3 billion today. Given that it never came close to its passenger targets and was ultimately abandoned for commercial flights, the script frames it as a $500 million mistake. The terminal even cost $30 million to maintain over its final decade before being demolished for $10 million in 2014. ### What is Mirabel used for today? Passenger flights never returned, but between 2008 and 2018 the airport's traffic tripled thanks to cargo flights, private jets, helicopters, and nearby flight schools, along with events like Canadian NASCAR. In 2020 it became a flight service station, with air traffic control operating 16 hours a day and monitoring nearly 100,000 movements per year. ## Sources - [Original MegaProjects video: Montreal's Mirabel Airport: A Disaster from Start to Finish](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2obvZ0pLRjc) - [Montréal–Mirabel International Airport — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montr%C3%A9al%E2%80%93Mirabel_International_Airport) - [Montreal-Mirabel International Airport — The Canadian Encyclopedia](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/montreal-mirabel-international-airport) - [Expropriated Mirabel land to be returned — CBC News](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/expropriated-mirabel-land-to-be-returned-1.605698) - [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NKN-2007-08-05_144714_MIRABEL_AIRPORT(Yvan_Leduc_author_for_Wikipedia).Jpg) by Yvan Leduc / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. ## Related Coverage - [The Laerdal Tunnel: The Longest Road Tunnel in the World](/article/laerdal-tunnel-longest-road-tunnel-world) - [What If Boeing's Passenger Jets Were Forced Offline?](/article/what-if-boeings-passenger-jets-were-forced-offline) - [The Ford Model T: A Revolutionary Car With a Terrible Dark Side](/article/ford-model-t-revolutionary-and-terrible-legacy)