^^ i have not idea what Country or State would have the most trade with the Province either.

Here's an idea, why doesn't a home grown Newfondland airline take the risk & add a flight to Dublin if there's such a huge connection between the two places, don't even wait for a Western Canadian based airline to offer the service.

It might mean that every st.John man, woman and child has to make at least one trip a year to Ireland to make it profitable over the long run for an airline... I doubt that there is much demand for the Irish to travel the opposite direction and fly to the province...

If a country with ~100,000 less people like Iceland can make it work than Newfoudland shoudl be able to too.:tup:

We have our own airlines (PAL, EVAS, etc.) but they mainly focus on flying provincial government officials to their districts in far-flung areas of the province, the Caribbean, and research/military work (i.e. it is our airlines that monitor fish stocks in the North Sea, respond to hurricanes in the Dutch-controlled parts of the Caribbean, etc.). They could do it, I suppose, but they don't own that type of plane. I wish they would. I'd gladly pay $1,000+ to fly to Dublin on PAL. They're such a great company:

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Just 2 years ago, YYC had 6x weekly flights to Asia in the winter months. This year, it will be zero.

HU has joined BA & AC NRT by going summer seasonal. I suspect YYC won't see year-round service to Asia again until WS decides to give it a shot.

They probably have a hard time competing with the many Chinese carriers flying to YVR.

The United States is by far the greatest importer of goods and services from NL, and it's not even close between 1st and 2nd (China). Ireland is not in the top 5, and gets lumped in with the "other", at a 2013 estimate of 1.5 billion among all other nations. NL's top exports are energy and metals (ie. hydro and ores). You can guess where the bulk of that ends up. Whether we want to admit it or not, we're much more intertwined in the North American market than the European.

Provincial Airlines does exist, as SHH said, but they don't have the infrastructure nor money to purchase a plane capable of making it across the Atlantic. Their largest plane in their fleet is a Beech 1900D. Their routes are already low-demand enough that a flight from St. John's to Goose Bay will likely run you 4 figures. I can't see them making a purchase of an Airbus A321 or Boeing 737 in hopes that a province of 520,000 people and shrinking will want to annually visit Dublin.

There's definitely enough of a market for a single direct flight to Europe.

For example, Air Canada is no charity and they're still providing a direct flight to London. They must be making money off it or they'd just cancel it.

If an airline were to come in and offer cheaper prices, they could take that market. Doesn't have to be Dublin (but should be, for the obvious reasons) - but any direct flight to Europe will do. Augment that with cheaper-still tickets to get the economy class travelers, and it's easy to fill a plane and pockets.

WestJet's flight was their most successful launch, and we know from Irish stats (Canada doesn't provide the same) that passenger numbers grew some 25% from launch during the relatively short time it was operational.

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RE: PAL, you're correct, but I just want to make sure people not from here know its focus isn't commercial air travel. It is world class at what it does (especially research, military work, weather monitoring, etc.), not some little hick airline. Also, PAL's prices to fly within the province are because their clientelle is mostly provincial government officials so no one cares what it costs. It's like when my car was hit last week - one of my quotes to repair the door was $4,000. The other was $2,000. One guess as to which of those two businesses is the primary auto body shop for auto insurance companies in the province. It's insurance, so no one cares, and prices are inflated.

I'm not disagreeing with that, the YYT-London Heathrow flight is both high demand and critical for St. John's-European business. London is also a world class city, and Heathrow itself opens up the rest of Europe through connecting flights. That flight is also critical to the oil & gas sector, with connecting flights to Aberdeen and Oslo out of there.

I can't see that flight going anywhere. Having a MAX8 on that route shows the airlines confidence in it, otherwise they'd throw their sexy, new plane elsewhere.

Oh ok, well that size of aircraft definitely wouldn't make it across the Atlantic if not jet aircraft, :rolleyes:
I was thinking maybe PAL had some larger 737 sized aircraft like some of the airlines that fly in Northern Canada's Territories like Air North, First Air or Canadian North.

https://firstair.ca/
https://flyairnorth.com/default.aspx
https://www.canadiannorth.com/

And that has no bearing on Dublin, a completely different case and circumstance.

Dont they have Dash8s?

They do, in fact they primarily operate Dash 8s. They only have two 1900Ds in their fleet. Dash 8 300s would be their largest aircraft. Obviously not capable of flying to Dublin, but they do occasionally fly charters to Nuuk Greenland.

Thats what i thought. Last i looked they had around 10 of them. Wouldnt want to go very far in one though.

Interestingly, St. Pierre Miquelon has had a once a week nonstop flight to Paris for a couple of years now. Which is impressive considering SPM's tiny size and population.

Apparently it's popular... I'm guessing SPM must have some cachet among the French as a tourism destination?

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel...-a8373811.html

One assumes it's heavily subsidized by the Govt of France.

Indeed - as a Department of France, a direct air connection from the metropole to SPM would be considered nation building, I'm sure......

Directly or indirectly too - I'd imagine that SPM's main sector of employment is government.

No real complaints from me if that's the case. My only gripe about the WS 789 from my experience on it was that the IFE was a glorified tablet I managed to crash a couple times to the generic Android OS main screen. It was slow, the video quality was mediocre, and all the controls were on screen, instead of having separate off-screen buttons for things like volume like AC does.

Open Line today is all about the direct flights again. They're really pushing for our government and airport authority to put in as much money as Nova Scotia did and buy the direct connection to Dublin back. But anyhow... Paddy said something intriguing, not sure if it's true.

He said it is apparently now not possible to get from Vancouver to St. John's in a calendar day. All possible flights will take more than 24 hours with connections.

That's false. A quick look on Google Flights dispels that.

Air Canada has a flight that departs from Vancouver at 11:30 with a 55 minute connection in Montreal and arrives the same day at 23:55. Total flight time: <8 hrs.

Now, if you loosen the rules a bit (not arriving same calendar day, but just after midnight) you probably have a dozen options for flights under 10 hours.

That's a limitation of travelling from west to east across a huge country, not a slight against Newfoundland.

Less than eight hours is much faster than I'd've expected. And yeah even if it's after midnight but still less than 24 hours, I'd count that too. Thanks!

(Sent in a correction. Let's see if they say it in the last hour haha)

EDIT: Wow, nope. They say the host tried to do it in June and couldn't get a flight and their business friends can regularly not get there in 24 hours.

...

Don't let facts get in the way of a good argument, I suppose.

I mean, you can look at Google Flights yourself (or they can, I suppose)

Perhaps the host had difficulties getting there on a particular day but that's a personal problem, not a fact. It's like finding out there's no hotel rooms available for me in St. John's on the Regatta and me stating that there's no hotel rooms in St. John's at all. It's just factually wrong.