Overview
- Canada cleared about 324 square kilometres of farmland in the late 1960s, displacing roughly 10,000 people to build Mirabel as a new hub.
- Planners envisioned six terminals and six runways and forecast up to 60 million passengers by 2010, with the airport opening in October 1975 ahead of the Montreal Olympics.
- Promised ground access never arrived, including a downtown high-speed rail line, leaving the airport distant as airlines and domestic traffic favored Dorval/Trudeau, which officials later called a 'doomed' setup.
- Passenger traffic never exceeded roughly three million annually, the final commercial flight departed on October 31, 2004, and the passenger terminal was demolished by 2016.
- The site persists for cargo operations, aerospace testing and aircraft assembly, the adjacent 344-room hotel closed in 2002, and business leaders link the failure to Montreal losing ground to Toronto.