Interesting that YOW-LHR upgauges to a 330 from the already planned 788 upgauge. Sign of strong summer bookings? The 788 will fly YOW-LHR in May still and showing reverting back to the 788 around October. Concurrently 1x daily YOW-YYZ Rapidair is also upgauging.

YOW appears to be the first Canadian airport to be reporting on 2020 pax stats:

YOW's January 2020 pax stats are out and all things considered, they're not bad:

2020 January / % Chg.
Domestic: 278,250 / +1.9%
Transborder: 61,877 / -7.1%
International: 66,255 / +3.8%
Total: 406,382 / +0.7% - this is a record for January.

YOW was in positive territory until May in 2019 (i.e. until the shock of the ORD suspension in June 2019 and the MAX situation finally catching up with YOW), so to be positive after last year's positive result, is not bad at all...still with no ORD.

12 Months Rolling / % Change vs Year End 2018
Dom: 3,998,840 / -0.1%
TB: 681,593 / -5.4%
Int'l: 429,054 / +10.6%
TTL: 5,109,487 / -0.03% - FYI the 12 month rolling number always differs from YTD actuals.

Rouge B767 fleet will go down from 25 to 23 by the end of this year.

Mainline B767s are staying this year, as mentioned, but will be gone by the end of 2021.

https://www.aircanada.com/content/da...019_MDA_q4.pdf

Maybe Air Canada is going to phase out Rouge longhaul?

Doubt that. Some of the Rouge 767s are 30 years old, just like the ones over at mainline. End of life is near.

We'll just have to wait and see if Air Canada rouge becomes Air Canada transat.

Interesting comments by AC CEO Calin during their Q4 and FY2019 earnings call today. Here are some of the highlights: (you need to sign-in to read the full transcript)

https://seekingalpha.com/article/432...all-transcript

Maybe a shrink then? It would make sense with the increase of A330s at the same time.

You're getting ahead of yourself. The merger isn't approved yet. AC wont divulge any fleet decisions ref. the merger until it is approved. Even then, AC has said they will keep both companies separate for a few years after the merger. So you will not see fleet integration for quite a number of years still.

It takes time to merge fleets/pilot rosters. Look at what happended with DL/NW and AA/US. It will be a messy integration as far as employees are concerned. That's a guarantee.

He posted this morning that AC was buying 4 more A330's, so I'm assuming those aren't Air Transat aircraft.

Yeah, I understood TS A330s for some reason. Either way, those A330s that AC are taking will stay at mainline for now. AC is doing a cabin refresh on its A330s to align them with what is on offer on the 787/777s.

Calin quote from today:


There is no reason to believe they want to wind down Rouge widebody, as far as I'm concerned. Routes like VCE, ATH, BCN will always yield better results with Rouge instead of mainline, so Rouge will always need widebodies. That being said, in 5-10 years time, I could see TS A330s taking over Rouge routes, once the merger matures and fleet integration happens. A long way to go until then though...

I honestly think after all these years and the economy doing much better in Greece, ATH is ready for Mainline. Unfortunately 9 weekly this summer from YYZ/YUL-ATH was cut.

That's what i've found too, seems like most of the people I know either have a place or a time share in SouthWestern USA, plus Florida is probably next in line for Saskatchewan travellers to America.

Flights out of SKyxe definitely in a North-South direction rather than any West-to-East persuasion in Canada,
with a dozen destinations from Saskatoon direct to Mexico and the Caribbean.

https://i.imgur.com/arHZ6rB.png
https://skyxe.ca/portals/0/destination%20map%20dots%20and%20lines%202019.jpg

And yet those very few east west flights carry most of the passengers I would assume.

Hmm, if you say so, that could very well be that the east-to-west flights would carry a lot of passengers from Quebec etc to Saskatchewan. The reverse of Saskatchewan passengers flying to the east not so much.

Looks like YYC will probably be permanently losing its link to China if the rumors going around that HU is being taken over by the government are true, possibly as soon as the next few days.

https://www.aviation24.be/airlines/h...hits-business/

On Weibo (Chinese social media site) it's being discussed Air China could simply being taking them over, well the other subsidies would be divided up between MU and CZ.

The map shows destinations, not flights (frequencies). You’d have to vary the thickness of the lines depending on number of flights, or even better number of weekly seats. For sure the #1 destination out of YXE is in Canada, probably either Toronto or Calgary.

I use to live in Saskatoon.

Most business travel is east-west. A lot of that traffic is originating in Saskatoon. That is the reason your will 4-5 flights a day between Saskatoon and Toronto. Same thing with 2-4 flights a day into Vancouver and probably north of 10 flights a day into Calgary. Most traffic to Asia and Europe is also going to connect in Canada.

Delta flies Minneapolis/St Paul twice a day. That is where a lot of the US connecting traffic is going.

The flights to Mexico, Vegas and Phoenix is almost all leisure. A few flights during the winter per day. You will be likely to have one flight a day a leisure destination during the summer.

If you use to live in Saskatoon, i'm surprised you think business travel is main reason for as many as a few flights a day to each Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton & a dozen flights a day to Calgary.

If Canada is similar to the US, and it probably is for the most part, 10% to 15% of travel is business and the rest is leisure.

Most Saskatchewan people that are flying to hubs in Canada and the States are flying to make connections to a wider assortment of final destinations other than the most popular ones like Vegas, AZ, Orlando and the half dozen Mexico and the half dozen Caribbean final destinations.

I'm sure as more sun destinations acquire greater numbers of people from the province, more non-stop flights to cater to more sun specific destinations will grow. Same for Canadian destinations in the Summer, if more Canadian cities that aren't hubs already become popular enough as destinations themselves to have non-stop flights, as the Mexico and Caribbean destination already are in Winter for Saskatchewan, then those Canadian final destinations will get direct flights from/to Saskatchewan. :tup:

YYZ finally published 2019 full year results. Here is the full list.

Canada's 8 busiest airports in 2019

YYZ 50,499,431 +2.0%
YVR 26,395,820 +1.8%
YUL 20,305,106 +4.5%
YYC 17,957,780 +3.5%
YEG 8,151,532 -1.2%
YOW 5,106,487 -0.1%
YWG 4,484,249 -0.0%
YHZ 4,188,443 -3.0%

For the smaller airports that have published 2019 results, see the following link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...orts_in_Canada