Any airport sustaining an annual traffic of 200,000 passengers or more for a period of three years will be added to the NAS. Any non-capital airport falling below this threshold for a period of three years will be removed from the NAS.
All airports in the NAS are owned by Transport Canada and leased to the local authorities operating them.
As of 1994 , the 26 NAS airports served 94% of all scheduled passenger and cargo traffic in Canada.
