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History of Cooking Lake Airport

Before runways were built across the North, floatplanes and skiplanes played an important role in early frontier aviation for their ability to get into even the remotest community by landing on the nearest lake or river.

Early floatplanes in the Edmonton region were based at Cooking Lake Air Harbour, an outpost of the municipal Air Harbour at Blatchford Field in Edmonton. The Province of Alberta established Cooking Lake Airport at its current site in Strathcona County in 1935 with both a paved runway and seaplane docks. The province sold it to Edmonton Airports in 1995.

In the pioneering years, Punch Dickens, Wop May and Leigh Brintmell frequently flew north out of Cooking Lake. Western Canadian Airways, an early ancestor of Canadian Airlines, was based there in the 1920s. In the 1930s, Wiley Post and Will Rogers stopped at Cooking Lake on an attempted around-the-world flight. Edmonton aviator Max Ward took delivery of his first Twin Otter at Cooking Lake in 1953 and used it to fly charters out of Yellowknife. Within 20 years his international charter airline Wardair (also eventually absorbed by Canadian) was flying Boeing 747s from Edmonton International Airport non-stop to London, Frankfurt and Honolulu.