Kelowna International Airport’s terminal expansion adds capacity and improves passenger processing at a major transportation hub in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. Completed ahead of schedule in early 2026, the project responds to rising passenger volumes while maintaining airport operations throughout construction.
The airport recorded 2.3 million passengers in 2025, reinforcing the need for additional terminal capacity and expanded security screening areas. The City of Kelowna, which owns and operates the airport, selected PCL Construction as construction manager based on its aviation infrastructure experience and collaborative project delivery approach.
The expansion is the largest infrastructure project in the airport’s history, with design features intended to improve passenger movement and support long-term growth.
A defining feature of the expansion is approximately 4,500 square metres of exposed mass timber sourced from British Columbia. The design incorporates cross-laminated timber and glue-laminated timber cassette panels, requiring careful coordination and moisture protection during installation.
PCL worked with mass timber manufacturer Kalesnikoff to prefabricate the panels before delivering them to the construction site. The installation included 44 primary beams and 177 timber cassettes, each weighing approximately 4,200 to 6,000 pounds. Protective wrapping, temporary weather protection and air-vapour barriers helped limit moisture exposure during installation.
The construction team also used building information modelling (BIM), 3D modelling and the Revizto coordination platform to integrate design information and identify potential clashes before they affected field work. These tools helped coordinate electrical, stormwater, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and fire-protection systems within the building’s structural design.
Ground conditions presented additional challenges, including poor soil quality, a high water table and a deeply buried artesian well near the planned geothermal exchange field.
The team relocated the geo-exchange system beneath an adjacent parking lot and redesigned it to cover a broader, shallower area. Phased construction planning helped limit disruption to parking, while the relocation removed the geothermal work from the project’s critical path.
PCL also used Controlled Modulus Columns to manage settlement between the existing terminal and the new structure. The ground improvement approach provided more predictable settlement control than soil preloading, which can require extended waiting periods before foundation work proceeds.
The change allowed foundation construction to begin shortly after column installation, reducing the schedule by several months and saving the client approximately $1 million.
The Kelowna airport project illustrates how prefabrication, digital coordination and early engineering decisions can improve delivery on complex transportation infrastructure projects. Maintaining airport operations while expanding terminal capacity required careful sequencing and coordination across multiple construction disciplines.
The project also supports the airport’s environmental objectives, which include carbon-neutral building operations by 2030 and net-zero airport operations by 2040. Mass timber, geo-exchange and thermal-recovery heat pumps form part of the strategy to reduce the expansion’s operational and embodied carbon impacts.
Source: PCL Construction.
