Canadians, and Quebecers in particular, don't fly nearly as much as Americans or Australians. You'd expect YUL to have PAX higher than both Boston and Melbourne but they have double what YUL posts. I find it strange that there are no direct flights to Victoria, Saskatoon, Regina, and London from Montreal as well but it speaks to how undeveloped the civil aviation industry is in this country.

Domestically, it's true, at least for Quebec. Not so much for the rest of the country. Internationally, your argument holds no water.

Quebecers fly, simply not to the places you want them to. Also, flying is often not the first choice for Canadians. The U.S is a mere hour or so away from most of the Canadian population.

N.Y, Washington, Boston, Philly etc... are all easily accessible by car/train from Toronto or Montreal, a mere 5-6 hours away.

Canadians hold their own when it comes to international travel, which is the metric you should use to compare Canada to the likes of the U.S and Australia. And based on that metric, we are doing fine, thank you very much.

Take away the domestic passenger numbers of Boston and Melbourne and you'll see what I'm talking about.

U.S domestic numbers are strong because a lot of Americans rather stay within their country when on vacation. That is illustrated by the fact that in 2012, only 36% of the American population had a passport. Granted, that is still over 100 million people, but you get my point. Canada's percentage is almost double that.

Australians by comparison, love to travel abroad. They get much more vacation days (minimum 4 weeks) than Canadians (min 2 weeks) or Americans (no minimum) do, simply because they are so far away from the rest of the world. Australians also have a thing called "long service leave", which gives you additional leave after an extended period of service with an employer. Ex. 1 or 2 more months of vacation if you've been with a company for more than 10 years.

Disagree completely. I've been through this argument many many times. I've heard all the arguments and each one is always full of holes. Very similar situations exist elsewhere in wealthy western democracies. The reality is that Canadian PAX is about 60% of where it should be.

High airport fees, the lack of true low cost carriers, and airports that were run as arms of the government instead of businesses has led to a stunted industry. Pearson is finally being run like a business, aggressively competing for traffic, adding amenities, adding retail, and doing what it should have been attempted 30 years ago: turn Pearson into a north American hub instead of just a Canadian one.

Better late than never but we have a ton of catching up to do. Pearson should be a global top 15 airport by PAX; Trudeau and Vancouver should both be in the top 50.

How many cities Vancouver's size have an airport as big as YVR? How many cities Toronto's size have one as big as Pearson?

LOL. With the tremendous aviation growth happening in the Middle East, India and East Asia, it will be a miracle if Pearson cracks the top 30, much less the top 15.

It is currently 33rd busiest, btw.

As for YVR and YUL being in the top 50, that means each one should handle close to 36 million passengers. As airports get busier every year, that limit will keep rising, so you're dreaming if you think YVR and YUL will ever crack the world's top 50 airports.

Point is, even if the government cuts all taxes it collects from the airport authorities, and even if a ton of LCCs make it into the Canadian market, your idea of where our airports should be will never materialize. That's a fact.

Looking at the list of the busiest world airports by passenger traffic in the top 15, I see either major transit points (Dubai, Atlanta, Frankfurt), the primary inbound/outbound gateways to countries (Tokyo, London-Heathrow, Beijing, Istanbul, Hong Kong) or some combination of the two (Chicago/LAX/JFK).

Toronto is a much smaller point of entry/exit than pretty much all of these places. If you want to go somewhere in the UK, you pretty much have to enter the country through London-Heathrow or Gatwick (yes, there are exceptions, I know). In Canada, the traffic is dispersed because of the large geographic area - why try and funnel all traffic through Pearson when a direct flight to Calgary, Vancouver or Montreal will be more convenient? For instance, Calgary has several direct international destinations that cities of its size in the US would salivate over (London-Heathrow, Frankfurt, Tokyo-Narita and Beijing).

Pearson does serve as a transfer point for the local area (Ontario, some of the bordering US states and certain points in Canada that don't have direct service internationally), but it also competes with US airports for US customers - O'Hare, Detroit and JFK/Newark. I think an apt comparison might be Sydney airport in Australia - a main gateway to Australia for a lot of passengers, but not the only gateway. Also, the metro populations of each city are roughly comparable.

Canada doesn't have big enough population to support huge domestic network, and does not have government subsidy to promote travel and attract international transit passenger... At this rate, it would be lucky if Toronto's is still ranked as high as 33rd after a few years, let alone going into top 15.

I know as a Western Canadian I avoid Pearson at all costs. There are enough options closer or with better connections than Pearson so why use that. Seeing Pearson in the top 15 or 30 Globally would take nothing short of a miracle in my opinion.

For myself and many others in my circle of friends travelling oversea to Europe or the Caribbean we have enough options out of Calgary, Edmonton, even Vancouver or the USA before Toronto.

Toronto has a limited market these days. Southern Ontario is it for the bulk of people, and even then I would imagine Buffalo, Detroit, Ottawa, etc would attract travellers.

I'm not really sure where you get the limited market thing. Toronto and Vancouver have both had huge increases in traffic over the last few years - much of that connecting traffic.

Pearson is actually the fourth largest point of entry into North America, only behind JFK, LAX, and MIA. It's ahead of ORD, way ahead of ATL, and by a fairly wide margin, also growing at a much faster clip internationally than both of them, both in terms of percentage and absolute growth. ATL is almost entirely a domestic airport. So this notion that YYZ is somehow just a Canadian hub or a hub for Ontario is completely false.

No one is claiming that YYZ has reached it's full potential, including the GTAA by the way. Air Canada is, what, the 13th largest international airline in terms of passenger carried and they are aggressively growing Pearson, funneling U.S. pax through YYZ.

One last point, Toronto and Sydney are not that comparable in size. The GTHA is substantially larger than greater Sydney, by a margin of almost 50%. That's not even considering the Greater Golden Horseshoe which would make it almost 75% larger than Sydney.

A 7% growth may seems "huge" to us, but they're just "average" to those Asian airports that are also aiming to take one of the spot in the top 30. Many of them will likely to pose a double-digits growth this year...

I realize that - but that wasn't the point at all. The GTA is not growing by 7% a year, therefor growth is coming from other people (or people are taking a lot more flights.

Australia and Canada are a very good comparison in both hub airports and inbound/outbound international gateways. Both countries have multiple points of entry into the country depending on what continent you are arriving from.
Asia flights to Canada primarily arrive to Vancouver and EU flights are dispersed largely among Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal. USA flights are even more dispersed among Canada's top 20 airports.

As far as domestic hubs go, Calgary would be Western Canada's major hub, & i'd imagine Montreal would be for Quebec, Toronto for Ontario and Halifax for Atlantic Canada.
Cities like Vancouver, Edmonton and Winnipeg basically fly domestically point to point anywhere in Canada with no need for hub connections, Australia seems much the same way with less use of hubs and more point to point domestically among larger cities & with major points of international entry being Sydney & Melbourne as well as Perth, Brisbane and Darwin.

This is probably why Sydney & Toronto airport size are the same. Toronto (5.5M) city is slightly larger than Sydney (4.5M) .Golden horse shoe catchment area in Ontario is probably another 1.5M more people with KWC, Hamilton, Niagara/St Cath and Oshawa. Sydney with Gosford, Central Coast & Newcastle to the north is .75M + another .75M with Blackstown and Woolongong to the south. If you count London Ontario as catchment to Pearson, I guess you can count Canberra to catchment area for Kingsford airport in Sydney. Toronto and Sydney are very similar in metro size and airport size & use domestically and internationally. Sydney-Melbourne is a very busy world airline route though.

I'm not disputing that Pearson is a large airport in North America, I'm just saying that compared to the top 15 airports by traffic worldwide, it is relatively appropriately positioned in total number passengers, considering the population it serves (Let's generously say ~35 million people, but I think that's pretty optimistic).

The US airports in the top 15 do serve a lot of domestic travel, for example Atlanta serves pretty much the entire southeastern US, which has a population of ~70 million people. The hub-and-spoke model in the US still concentrates a heck of a lot of people through certain airports.

As compared to a point of entry/exit, Pearson is most certainly is smaller than:
Beijing
London-Heathrow
Hong Kong
Paris-Charles de Gaulle
Tokyo
Shanghai
Amsterdam
JFK
Frankfurt
LAX
Istanbul

These two factors: 1) Limited service population and 2) Smaller point of entry/exit due to the dilution of passengers to other airports in Canada and the US will probably exclude Pearson from the top 15 by passengers.

I feel the comparison to Sydney is the most appropriate (albeit not perfect - Australia lacks a partner as large as the US) as metro Sydney's population is ~5 million and the GTA is around ~6 million.

New South Wales has a population of about ~7.7m and neighbouring Victoria is ~6m and Queensland is ~4.8m, for a total of ~18.5 million. For comparison Ontario is ~14m, Quebec is ~8m, and Atlantic Canada about 2m for a total of ~24m. Nominally larger, but close enough for comparison.

Compared to the other countries/areas in the top 15, we are on the small side.

As a personal aside: I personally don't get the fascination with numbers. What does it matter if Pearson is in the top 15 or not? The airport is well connected to destinations, still reasonably pleasant to fly through and not insanely crowded. Other airports that are larger tend to be more miserable to fly through and really don't have that much more to offer in terms of destinations.

I would hardly say EU flight dispersed "largely" between YVR, YYC, YYZ, and YUL. YYZ and YUL maybe but YYC and YVR in almost no way have a large number of EU flights.
U.S. flights are even more heavily skewed towards Pearson (it being the second biggest feeder into the U.S. of any airport. YYZ handles more U.S. pax traffic than YYC, YVR, and YUL combined so I'm not sure why you think what you think.

Also, the Greater Golden Horseshoe is closer to 9 million, but either way, from an airport's growth projections, that's not the catchment it would be looking at. YYZ is within a couple of hours flight to 100 million population in the U.S.. Hence AC's growth strategy of trying to funnel U.S. pax through YYZ onward to international destinations.

Your announcements are certainly 'official' enough for me :tup:

Reported this morning on airlineroute.net: http://www.routesonline.com/news/38/...hedule-in-s17/

Looks to be starting with an A330-200 as their A350s are now scheduled to be coming in August 2017 rather than May.

While YVR is certainly not a European gateway by any stretch of the imagination, I think it more than holds it's own to Europe. Summer peak sees nearly 30,000 seats per week to Europe and the UK, that's just under half of the 65,000 YUL sends, who I would definitely describe as a European hub.

I agree that YVR holds its own and even punches well above its weight, but I was disputing the "largely" dispersed claim made earlier.

Toronto handles just over 100,000 seats to Europe a week. While I'll agree YUL should belong in the same group, YVR isn't really close, anything else is a rounding error.

Western Canada's direct flights to EU are handled by YVR, YYC, YEG & even YWG for population of 12M Western Canadians, YYZ is the sole airport for flights to EU for Ontario and even some parts of Quebec and Atlantic Canada, so it may stand to reason YYZ may have double or triple the number of seats as any one airport in Alberta or BC to EU.

I'm still not sure why Americans would be considered in catchment area of Pearson for travel to EU etc.
Why would someone fly to Pearson when there are so many more competitive options by USA airlines through their hubs in cities like Chicago, NYC, Detroit, Cleveland, Minni, Philly, DC, Boston, Charlotte and Atlanta etc. I think I remember hearing about a time when Montreal built an airport called Miribel to be a big hub for the NorthEast but it became another white elephant, probably largely due to travellers wanting to fly nonstop without need anymore for having to go to places in Canada like Gander or Montreal etc, especially when weather and snow delays are a real possibility for half the year in Great lakes area.

Well that doesn't really take into account "dispersal" now does it?

I'd say ~90 flights a week is pretty good dispersal for a city of under 3 million. Sure it doesn't compare to YYZ's ~300, but then again no one ever said it did...