New YUL flight.

About time!!!!

Air Canada Adds Daily Vancouver-Boston Flights to Growing Transborder Network for Summer 2017

Some very sad news from St Hubert (CYHU) over the weekend. As a controller myself this is my worst fear. My heart and sympathy goes out to all those involved. Obviously it's far too early to speculate what caused the collision, but I am interested to see what TC will eventually report.

1 Dead after planes collide near St Hubert airport

YHU is one of the busiest GA airports in the country. They do an awesome job dealing with all the foreign pilots that go through the flight schools there. This is truly a sad turn of events for the folks there and I feel for the victims and their families.

I was working at my tower when this happened, and having seen the replay of the radar footage, my heart sank when I saw both planes merging and disappearing from radar....

I obviously cannot comment on the situation any further, but what we know, according to the following article (among others)...

http://montrealgazette.com/news/loca...-student-pilot

2 Chinese pilots, 21 and 23 years old, each on a solo flight, one with 40 hours, the other with 140 hours experience.

One of the pilots did not respond to four attempts to contact him. The planes crashed after one of the pilots inexplicably changed altitude.

Sad, sad turn of events, that will scar all the people involved (families, pilots and controllers) for the rest of their lives.

I was thinking of the connectivity our airports provide and I put together a list looking at the population Canadian airports are connected to via direct flights (or semi-direct like Philippine YYZ-YVR-MNL or AC's YYZ-SCL-EZE).

Turns out our cities are pretty well connected and there are some interesting results.

http://i.imgur.com/f7eSlxu.png

Some things I discovered:

• Montreal is connected to a lot of smaller cities, with by far the lowest average size, whereas Vancouver is connected to fewer much larger cities.
• Cities connected to Vancouver are over twice the size on average vs those connected to Montreal. Calgary's average city is nearly 3 times the size of Montreal's.
• Average population of city Calgary is connected to is a staggering 16 million.
• Toronto is connected to more or less half a billion people.
• Asian cities are big, like really big.

Nice compilation, but ultimately meaningless.

All those Chinese megacities with tens of millions of people. What percentage do you think can afford a plane ticket to YVR?

Flying might be taken for granted here in North America, but it is still very much a luxury for the vast majority of Earth's population.

I can assure you half a billion people cannot simply fly off to YYZ. Not even close.

Simple arithmetic can be deceiving.

n.b.14 million Londoners will have a hard time flying non stop to YEG on 16 or so flights a year.....!

Actually the January figures for tourism for British Columbia or YVR were very good.This is what I placed in the provincial economies thread but it could also be shown here.


I should note there are many Canadians whom cannot afford to fly either. With the sheer numbers in China's growing middle class. It certainly does mean something.

Great work, leftcoaster. i think of:

1) Further potential growth from asia (esp china and other developing asian countries) will be a massive driver for air traffic

2) what will happen to established TATL flows with the rise of LCCs?

3) did anyone try or think of trying YUL-TYO?

Per capita in China, not many, but in raw numbers? Hard to say. There's a lot of poverty in China still (especially out west), but there's is an obscene amount of wealth too. A lot of middle class Chinese in the major cities.

Leftcoaster, cool lists.

Ya aren't there as many class Chinese as the entire population of Canada? Or more? And millionaires are created daily there lots of all kinds of people.

https://canadianaviationnews.wordpress.com/

Pearson with a big increase in passengers, 8% for the year.

Thanks for the feedback...

I think the stats about who actually flies places is more than hashed out, in you know, the passenger statistics, so I thought this was a fun different way to look at our airports.

Wasn't really implying anything with who can afford to fly where.

I don't have exact numbers (no one does, really), but the government claims to have moved over 600 million people above the poverty line in the past couple of decades. Take that for what you will. There's certainly more middle class Chinese than the population of Canada though. A lot more.

Some are suggesting the Chinese consumer will be a central diver in the future.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china...ploding-2016-8

http://www.economist.com/news/specia...ever-threatens

Don't defend yourself LeftCoaster! Your post was very interesting, both in and of itself, and for a number of speculations it may give rise to. It is good to see something (anything) through a new perspective. Thanks for the work.

The response by thenoflyzone suffers from being the same kind of "useless" as it was claiming your work to be. thenoflyzone needs to get its head back from its butt.

Not "who".

Bob the businessman living in downtown T.O and flying out of YTZ 3 times a week for business counts for 312 of the 2.5 million passengers that use that airport. So no, passenger statistics don't give us an accurate metric of who flies. Just how often the few fly !

It would be interesting to find out how many individual flyers an airports sees a year. Now that would surely be an interesting compilation.

Wow, bold letters no less !

I'm sorry, who are you again? I can't really see, since, you know, apparently i have my head up my arse...

I agree the middle class in China is going to be a major economic driver. Driven by disposable income and the massive number of people.

However a family income of below $40k is not going to drive massive tourism to Canada. The number that are in the upper middle class is far more interesting.

Who am I? You don't really care. Regardless, don't sweat it. (I know, you're not.) The post was in support of 'the other guy.'

Sources on flyertalk saying that YUL-TLV on AC is now showing B789, at least internally.