I wish great success to this airline, we really need lower prices here in Canada for air travel. That said, they expect to start operation in 2015 with two Boeing 737-300 aircraft. I don't know who they're getting them from though, but that means they'll have to run a severely restricted version of their dream route map until they can get their 737-MAX aircraft delivered (no earlier than 2021).

Also, I do not understand a few of their routes, like:


Victoria-Ottawa -- I live in Ottawa, and I can say that this would definitely be a pretty small market for them unless they run it as seasonal summer service. The reason they're doing this, however, is probably to avoid the heavy competition from AC and WJ on the YOW-YVR route.

Penticton-Vancouver/Edmonton -- I know they're looking for underserved western markets, but do you really need to fly to Penticton (pop. 42,000) from YVR AND YEG? Especially since Kelowna is only a 45 minutes drive away with over four times the population and able to (and does) support much more routes.

Abbotsford-Las Vegas -- I don't get this one considering they also have a YVR-LAS flight as well, downtown Vancouver being only 45 minutes away. Maybe they'll try both and keep the one that performs best?

Winnipeg-Flin Flon -- Very low population town (pop. 5,500), but they might be doing it to compete with Calm Air + Bearskin. The drive to Winnipeg is 9 hours, 8 hours to Regina and 6 hours to Saskatoon.

Victoria-Ontario -- They have a YVR-ONT flight in the plans too. Maybe this is another Abbotsford-LAS case.


More things, they should really have a Montreal-Hamilton flight, considering YUL's only flight connections are westward with Winnipeg. Also, I don't know if it's just the route map being too small, but I can't see a Victoria-Vancouver flight. I hope they put one, because if they don't that kills a lot of the routes to and from Victoria because then the passengers would have to connect with other airlines to reach their final destinations (mainly YVR).

I think Penticton is meant to serve Kelowna. As for flights from Abbotsford to Las Vegas, Abbotsford is reasonably far from Vancouver International Airport so maybe they're trying to see if it can support extra routes, because right now Calgary and Edmonton are its only real destinations.

Victoria to Ontario makes even more sense though–nobody wants to take a long ferry ride to fly out. I think both of these cases are a "build it and they will come" sort of thing. I hope they're right!

YYZ 2014 Pax Stats
 

Canada's busiest airport has finally released its 2014 passenger stats info.

And what a year it was!

http://www.torontopearson.com/en/gtaa/statistics/##

Up 6.8% to ~ 38.6M passengers. That's an increase of over 2.4 million over 2013.

40 million should be cracked quite easily in 2015.

Sweet! 40M for Toronto and 20M for Vancouver! Big landmark totals and per-capita equals! :cheers:

It is weird to say the least. The best they could do honestly is the same thing that Grayhound Air tried to do when they started. Operate as a hub. Have a wave arrive from the Eastern cities at the same time into Winnipeg. Transfer all the passangers and then have those flights head west. Then turn around and head back, again time all West to East wave to arrive at the same time.

If they can't secure all the gates in Winnipeg, maybe use Saskatoon as the transfer airport. Saskatoon has lots of gates to handle the early morning rush and then its only one or two aircraft on the ground at any point in time until the late evening rush in. That provides lots of gates to handle a small hub like this.

Awesome...They are staying just ahead of Seatac! Quite the growth too!

??We fly Alaska (via SEA) to SNA, ONT and LGB from YYJ all the time. No ferry involved. Might take the ONT flight if I was going to Palm Springs... which lots of people from here do in the winter (def a seasonal route intention for Jetlines). If I am going to Disneyland I think I would still connect through SEA to SNA or LGB (my fav LA area airport!).. unless the price was a bit lower.

Still want to try BUR via SEA when going to Universal Studios though...

Some love for LGB:

http://airchive.com/blog/wp-content/...cd2d43f1_c.jpg

https://southla.files.wordpress.com/.../longbeach.jpg

http://www.studio-111.com/files/6813...ch-Airport.jpg

http://www.hok.com/about/news/wp-con...-Airport-2.jpg

http://lbpost.com/images/addison/201...BConcourse.jpg

http://www.eurocarrental.net//system...library/93.png

source: Long Beach Airport

I'm not exactly an air expert :P If the service is already popular, then you're actually helping my point!

Just that to get to ONT from YYJ - we don't need to take a ferry - was mine :) Lots of the Palm Springs folks just fly to PSP via SEA or YVR. Not sure ONT would be that popular, but I am sure these guys have studied O&D numbers...if it was really cheap I'm sure some folks wouldn't mind the drive...but the ones who generally go from here are not exactly paupers... So yeah.

Hey, YYJ Victoria got voted best small airport in North America again for service :) I'd have to agree :P

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/17/travel...tomer-service/

Nice. The airport is well designed for its side.

At some point they need to add parking

Assuming this bird ever gets off the ground, I doubt capacity at YWG will be an issue. It is not unusual to see only a couple of gates occupied at once for much of the day between the morning and evening rushes.

The video of their renovations is quite interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1cSrlmbeWk

It's a bit more than 45 mins from Penticton to Kelowna airport. More like 1h10 or so. Having flown into both, I would say having more routes out of Penticton is a good thing for the area. There's a lot of seniors in Penticton that might not like the drive to Kelowna, but would welcome flights out of Penticton. My in-laws are examples for sure.

A KLM 747 at YUL last week

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7316/...c28f80a9_b.jpgBoeing 747-400 de KLM by Bo No Bo, on Flickr
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7357/...87a9e75b_b.jpgBlue Queen by LASCAR35, on Flickr

Just a side tangent here, but where and when did all this YYG, YQG, YY...whatever start? I even hear some people on TV now refer to their city using the same airport acronym. I feel behind the times.

It's asinine. It's a point of pride to me that really no one in Winnipeg refers to Winnipeg as YWG unless they work for an airline. I mean, this I <3 DT YEG nonsense... do they mean downtown Leduc or what?

Ugh, tell me about it. People in Kingston use #ygk as our twitter hashtag, even though our airport is almost never used with only a handful of flights to Pearson each day that are bought only by the rich due to their insanely high prices.

Maybe it has a thing to do with the character restrictions in tweets?

I can understand this with cities that have airport codes which are readily discernible like MIA, PHX, BOS, PHL, even LAX. But Canadian ones are obscure... would many people from outside those cities really be able to figure out what the hell YYT, YYJ, YUL or YXE are? C'mon man.