Here you are comparing US and Canada numbers. US airports get more passengers since there are more people in the US, that's it. Airport numbers are more reflective of the region served not the city. Of the top 40 airports in North America Canada has 4, as you would expect by population. Toronto does not punch below its weight, Toronto is just too big wrt the population of the country.

AC was very eager to dump the first 15-20 E190s because these aircraft had the same engine and wing maintenance issues as the early JetBlue E190s, As described above by thenoflyzone.

Embraer was able to solve the computer issues and some of the maintenance issues were solved, however the performance and certain other maintenance issues could not be retrofitted onto the early build aircraft.

The second issue for AC is that the 25 remaining "good" E190s is too small of a fleet to be viable.

Finally and specific to AC, the E190 has a very small cargo hold for its size of airplane. AC derives a significant amount of revenue from Cargo. On a full airplane, the cargo compartments routinely bulk out for AC, especially in the winter when AC is transporting sports teams and vacationers going for golf and cycling.

The 736 seats 20% more pax than comparable E190, but the E190 is not 20% less expensive to operate than the 736. So again the question between the two airplanes is about whether the additional seats can be filled.

Pilot costs are another issue that favours E190 over the 736. At AC, because the E190 is in a different pilot group from the Airbus narrowbody, the pilot pay rates are different. However, at WS there is no difference in pilot pay rates for the 736.

I guess my overall point is that at a CASM level, the E190 and 736 are substantially equivalent from a cost perspective.

Pascan Aviation will link Saint-Hubert Airport to Billy Bishop Airport starting in April with two daily flights.

http://www.lecourrierdusud.ca/actual...-toronto-.html

Would like to see more flights like this. St. Hubert Airport could potentially fill a similar role as Billy Bishop does for Toronto.

Canadians often make that argument but it's a viewpoint frozen in time. It would have some relevance if we were living in 1960. We've been living in a globalized world for decades and there's no reason Toronto should be drawing fewer customers than Chicago or LA. Toronto and Pearson are failing to attract as many visitors as our competitors. That Pearson has some of the best connections of any airport in north America would suggest that it should be one of the top 2-3 cities for transit between Europe and this continent. It's starting to happen but Pearson is really just catching up to where it should have been all along.

Management at Pearson has long viewed their job as that of administrators. It's only in the last 5-6 years have they woken up to the fact that we live in a globalized world, airports are big business, and that they're in competition with every other hub on the continent to be #1. Canadians often assume that the natural order of things is for Americans or the US to be #1. Do you think the Dutch are arguing that Schipol can't be #1 in Europe because the Netherlands only has 17 million people?

Pearson should be pulling 60-70 million passengers annually. Vancouver 40-50 million.

I think those numbers are a bit extreme, especially yvr.... and would probably only happen if yyc, yul, yeg, yow etc give up most of their international and usa routes and even some domestic routes.

yyz should have been 50+, yvr 30, yul 25 in today's times.

yyz and yvr are growing really fast and catching up to those numbers, let's see how long they can keep these growth rates. Canadian airports do lag behind a quite a bit of what you would normally expect

AC is finally waking up at yyz and doing what KLM, LH, SQ etc have been doing for years at ams, fra, sin

It kind of is. It's already the fourth largest port of entry into NA, behind JFK, LAX, and MIA. And with MIA it's almost exclusively Latin America. So other than JFK, YYZ is already number 2 or 3 in NA for European pax traffic.
Or are you referring specifically to connecting passengers?

^^ Pearson is getting there but in reference to that sentence I was talking about connecting passengers. Another weakness is in transborder traffic. Americans are far more likely to travel to Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles as a final destination. Canada has the biggest and richest market just across the border yet we draw astonishingly poorly amongst Americans.

Pearson should easily be the #1 airport in north America by international passengers due to the market of 320 million right next door. US airports only have Canada and Mexico on their door step; a far smaller customer pool.

Canada was once the #2 destination on the planet for international travel if you can believe it. That lofty ranking was due to having the US next door. Americans stopped coming here like they did half a century ago. That needs to change. Toronto is finally getting on their radar but we haven't really hit the mother lode yet.

Agree 100%. 8% growth is great and Pearson is doing a lot right these days. That said we're really just playing catch up to where we should have been all along.

For the past couple of weeks, Air Canada seems to be making a sport of flying people to St. John's and then back to wherever they came from. Today, though, it wasn't their fault. They sent a larger-than-usual plane to try to get rid of some of the backlog of St. John's passengers (mainly in TO, MTL, and, oddly, Fredericton) and YYT didn't have the runway it would need to use cleared. :haha: Of course, Air Canada has managed to make it about themselves with horrible customer service (they didn't even tell the passengers they were turning back before they started - they only realized when the flight tracker on board was updated, lol; and, of course, ditched them in Toronto with no agents to help).

WestJet managed to get good press out of it, though. Last week in Fredericton a WestJet pilot ordered pizza for the stranded Air Canada passengers, whom that airline told there was nothing they could do to get them something to eat.

http://i.imgur.com/SF3yxDr.png

http://i.imgur.com/lfolb1L.png

AM going double daily year round on MEX-YUL/YYZ/YVR.

http://www.routesonline.com/news/38/...ervice-in-s17/

Wow. Air Canada seems to have 2 and sometimes even 3 flights a day this summer from YYZ to MEX.

But can Pearson accommodate 60-70 million passengers per year? I've heard they hit capacity at 50 million.

Passengers - while an important measure of success - aren't the only measure. To me, connectivity is more of a draw. Using an extreme case, Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport serves about 44 million passengers per year. They have exactly one transatlantic flight - British Airways to London. Pearson absolutely destroys Phoenix from the standpoint of connectivity to the world. Also, flying domestically within the US is huge, on a scale unmatched here.

European airports tend to be the primary gateways for each country. Schipol Airport is the primary international gateway to the Netherlands. The other airports are minor by comparison. Canada, due to geography, has several major points of entry - Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. If all international flights had to pass through Toronto first (*shudder*), Pearson would easily be 80 million people per year. And it would be a miserable, miserable experience.

My most enjoyable flights have been out of relatively small airports. I get that if you want to go to certain destinations, you have to use a larger airport, but if I can avoid it, I would. Connectivity is greater than passenger numbers as a metric of how good an airport is to me.

Good points. And I find that factoid above astonishing.

Even ATL is largely a domestic airport, yet it's the busiest in the world.

JFK has about 31.6 million international passengers through it per year. It is the primary gateway to the New York area internationally. Newark had 12.3 million international passengers through it. Considering New York's size and status in the global scheme of things, this sounds about right.

Pearson is at 25 million, which is second place. Considering the difference in scale globally between New York and Toronto, I'm actually surprised it does as well as it does. :shrug:

As for luring American connecting passengers, outside of upstate NY/Ohio/Michigan and Pennsylvania, why would they connect through Toronto?

If they're going to Europe, they're probably connecting through one of the Northeastern US airports, which is in the direction they are heading anyway. Or if they're going to Asia, connecting through LAX/SFO/SEA - again, in the direction that they're intending to go.

As for the travel habits of Americans to Canada itself, I'd imagine that Canada isn't much of a travel destination for them. Toronto is a fairly generic North American city and many of the things that you can do in Canada (skiing, outdoorsy stuff) you can do in the US without the hassle of a passport. Places like Montreal and Quebec might give something of a European vibe to those who are interested in that on a budget. I mean, we should promote tourism, but there are barriers, not least of which is that there is a lot of similarity between the countries.

Go Air Canada!


How Air Canada is sneaking up on everybody to become the newest global carrier

Bloomberg New - Feb 16, 2017
http://business.financialpost.com/ne...global-carrier

Yeah, American culture is reflected in their flying patterns. Many of the same Americans who would spend thousands of dollars and quite a few vacation days flying around the country to follow their college football team wouldn't consider getting a passport and visiting a foreign country.

I remember the first time I landed at LHR when I was 22. I thought I had arrived at the crossroads of the world. London is the most globalized city on the planet, and, at least in that respect, New York is in its shadow. If your airport serves just one overseas city, it's probably going to be London.

Conversely, is there any city that is less important globally for its size (at least in the developed world) than Phoenix, Arizona? This is not a statement about its urban form.

Agreed 100%. We actually do really well in that regard. I mean, Calgary has nonstop year-round service to Tokyo and Beijing. How many American cities, or even European cities, of 1.4 million can say that?

Yeah, again, most Canadian airports are a good size, easy to walk across, have many nonstop destinations and are rarely crowded. At airports like ATL, you walk off the plane and feel like you're in the middle of a Black Friday sale. When you're pissing in the urinal, there's two guys standing behind you, clearing their throat loudly and waiting their turn.

Even more importantly, Canadian airports have ample runways, so you don't sit on the tarmac for ages waiting to take off.

I was using it as an extreme example which is coincidentally very similar to Toronto in passenger numbers, but very different in connectivity to the world.

There are a number of airports in the US that are better connected, but have similar passenger numbers to Pearson - McCarran (Las Vegas), George Bush (Houston), Miami, Charlotte, etc. etc.

I'd add that more Americans travelling to Canada won't necessarily fill up Pearson as most of them travel to Canada by car, don't they? I mean, sure, there are Californians who want to visit Newfoundland and will transit through YYZ, but for the most part, Americans will drive across the border and visit the parts of Canada that are closest to where they live.

In recent years, Americans have made about 12 million overnight trips to Canada a year. That's not that many when you consider there are over 300 million people in that country.

Americans - by and large - do not care about Canada. That's not a judgement of Americans, that's a fact. The ones closest to the border have the closest connection (obviously), but in my travels to the US most are indifferent.

This is not the most terrible thing in the world IMO. Better to be regarded with indifference as opposed to undue attention that's usually because something very bad is happening between the countries.