By the way, can anyone provide an example of another country that had as drastic a hub-and-spoke system as Canada?

Where, say, traditionally... to fly from St. John's to Dublin, you had to fly 3.5 hours in the wrong direction, 3.5 hours back, and THEN set off for your destination heading the right way.

As far as I can tell, every other country in the world doesn't do that. Even Russia links its middle-of-nowhere cities in a straight line.

It seems WestJet is just doing what's normal everywhere else by dropping this planes down in St. John's and Halifax en route.

There is no direct service between Sapporo and North America. People must fly south to Tokyo for the connection. A Tokyo-Toronto route pretty much go directly above Sapporo...

I imagine similar situations might exist in Russia and China. Strangely, Brasilia has pretty limited international air connections, such that if you were flying to Toronto, you might need to fly first to Sao Paolo.

On a hemispheric level, Copa Airlines in Panama has created an incredible network, with a single hub in Panama City, that creates all kinds of seemingly strange air routes (due to flight frequencies and the desire to avoid connecting in the USA). For example, to fly from Georgetown Guyana to Buenos Aires, it could make sense to use Copa via Panama City.

Way to go Quebec City!!! :tup:

YQB expension by GraphSynergy



• Video Link

Hainan Airlines to start YUL-PEK service in June 2015 with Boeing 787 according to a translated chinese document.

France was somewhat like that, Air France was directing most of it's traffic through CDG/ORY for anything international, with a few point to point flights between major cities.

Uhhhhh..
Britain
france
Germany
United States

Just to name a few.

Japan, China, India

Air Canada is actually a bit of an outlier in this respect with trans-Atlantic service to many non-hub airports.

PEK-YMQ (Montreal), JUNE, B787-9, 4X in summer / 3X in winter

Who's operating it?

Hainan Airlines

Montréal is a truly international airport, with the highest proportion of international travelers in the country, some 38% (62% if we include passengers heading to the United States).
Number of direct destinations, Montréal has done very well. It is in 2nd place with 129 destinations (131 today), including 75 international ones.

Nice plane, nice expansion under construction too!

That is no longer the case...

From ACT7 on SSC:

http://www.torontopearson.com/upload...-08-AugPAX.pdf

Some highlights:
International pax count in Aug up 140K compared to Aug 2013,to 1,333,032.
YTD international pax increase of 600K compared to 2013 YTD
Aug appears to best month ever at YYZ, breaking the 4 MM pax count for the first time
YTD overall growth of 1.6 MM pax or 6.6%
International pax traffic now represents the highest proportion of passenger traffic at YYZ, representing 39% of overall, and has now passed YUL, at 38%, as the airport with the highest proportion of international traffic (ex. transborder, of course since YYZ was already dominant in that category).

As has been the case for several years now, total international pax traffic AND volume growth in international traffic exceeds YVR, YUL, and YYC combined.

It's a nice expansion - but is there a need for this? I always assumed Quebec City is more of a regional airport since the economy is driven by government as I
Opposed to large companies with international exposure.

What kinda routes are they going to try to attract? Most of there international routes are leisure routes (sun and Paris seasonally). I doubt AC adds much, rouge if anything since YUL is so close.

I've been wondering the same thing. Quebec City is extremely popular with french tourists, although they're not exclusively pulled toward that city. The average french tourist will start and finish their trip in Montreal, or will finish it in Toronto if they're doing the MTL-QC-MTL-OTT-TOR thing. There's definitively a seasonal demand for a Paris flight at least a few times a week, but is this market expandable to the point of a daily year round flight? Not now at the very least. Other than that, I could see seasonal charter London flights being operated from the uk and targeting 2 peaks; summer and winter (for skiing and the festival season). I really don't understand why QC doesn't market itself to the British for skiing... It's perfect; good little restaurants, lots of friendly bars, a few decent clubs and its small. Mont Saint Anne is ridiculously close to downtown. If there's ever been a low hanging fruit this is it.

As far as the business sector is concerned, Quebec City is not like Ottawa, where several hundred federal employees need to travel either abroad or further than a car ride within Canada on a daily basis. The vast majority of provincial civil servant travel is done within the province and 90% of the population of the province resides within a 250km radius of Quebec city.

Other than this, I could see the QC region being close to reaching that friction point within the next 10 years which would allow it to take some independence from Yul in regards to some US destinations.

YQB seemed pretty sleepy to me when I was in there in September. Even YHZ seems a lot busier in comparison. Regardless, that's a nice little expansion you have going on there.

http://www.aeroportdequebec.com/en/p...on-investment/

basically, this is the reason why

Do you have a source for this? A quick google search shows nothing, which is surprising given that it sounds like big news.