Agreed, but we do pay heavily for the privilege. When Transport Canada offloaded airports to local operating authorities, they pretty well all decided that new or expanded terminals were sorely needed and set out on pricy construction projects. Even places that weren't exactly bursting at the seams too. And we're paying for it all with steep AIFs... which is part of the reason that ULCCs don't really exist in any meaningful sense.

Sure, flying from O'Hare to Miami means you see some ugly, outdated crowded terminals, but if you can do it for $79 each way, that kind of takes the sting out.

YUL-DKR/TUN and YYZ-ACC/LOS/JNB are already identified. Let's see what happens....

Air Canada has ended their YYZ-IST flights.

I am going to weigh in on this PAX debate and say I completely disagree with those saying Canadian airports underperform. I would say they overperform in a big way and looking at Intl' pax this is quite clear.

I just completed my analysis of the top 10 airports in the US and Canada for Intl PAX and both Pearson and YVR make the cut, and outperform their American counterparts handily:

http://i.imgur.com/m5Uu8LO.png

It's amazing, Pearson outperforms LAX and YVR is likely to pass Atlanta and Chicago in 2017! I don't know how you can say that's not impressive.

Where Canadian airports lack is domestic connections, and I don't really know how you can convince Canadians to fly more within their own country...

Get pricing down?

Hardly surprising. Seems YYC-NRT is getting a dreamliner in the summer. Maybe from the IST termination.

On another note, AC launched YUL-PVG today ! :tup:

Yup YVR's international growth led North American airports and the top 3 were all West Coast airports. That's very impressive.

Like you said "connections" are lacking, and that's because you can fly direct from most Canadian cities to most other ones. I the US there are simply more cities and thus more connections are needed.

There just isn't the demand, so it's obscenely expensive to fly within much of Canada. A friend of mine just came back from Goose Bay, Labrador, and went on to Cairo. Her flight from St. John's to Cairo was cheaper than from St. John's to Goose Bay.

Even within the populated core of the country... Toronto is the alpha city. Most people can do their business there without having to leave. And if they did have to leave, Canada is huge. It's not like hopping a commuter flight from Glasgow to London. It's like leaving London for Moscow. It's a bigger deal, so it happens less frequently. And even when it does happen, these people don't really have to go to many places. Vancouver, Calgary, or Montreal for the most part. And all of these have international business connections that are probably more important than any connection to another Canadian city.

So without more extensive business travel to subsidize the rest of us, it's expensive.

In places like St. John's, people who would fly simply cannot afford to leave at all. Elsewhere, they might drive instead.

YYC had the 788 last summer, too.

Air Canada said that 2017 is the end of their 3 year growth plan, and that capacity will start to fall in the second half of 2018. I find that very disappointing, and was hoping to see more in the way of routes, as I feel there are still a couple of holes in their routes (SE Asia and Africa).

Ummm capacity will start to fall in "the second half of 2018."

That's over a year away. Plenty of time to announce new routes... there are still plenty of new Dreamliners coming online. And yes growth will "start to fall" but not grind to a hault. Why the pessimism?

I can understand growth stopping, but why decrease capacity?

Does it actually say capacity is going to be decreased or capacity growth is going to be decreased?

I think the words were a decrease in capacity. Maybe I'm taking that in the wrong context.

Temporarily

So they say...

I heard it might be temporary on flyertalk as well. But it doesn't make sense.

AC810/811 has been removed from the online schedule and booking system completely. Seems like a permanent route closure to me. Why would they do that if they plan on reinstating the route? Closing sales, even for a short while, will only hurt the flight, not promote it.

They had already suspended the flight til March 1, and it was to be resumed on a 3x to 5x weekly basis after that for the summer season. When this was announced a few weeks ago, it seemed like the start of the end for this flight anyways.

i don't know if it was air canada or not but on a Istanbul - Toronto flight the other day they found someone wrote something like Bomb to Toronto on the bathroom wall and they had to fly back to istanbul.

Why are the washrooms at Pearson so drearily reminiscent of a bus station? They're awful, small and drab. YVR's feel like a luxury hotel by comparison.