Canadian Airport Thread II

[casper]

Originally Posted by whatnext

I'm sure those posting here are already familiar with it but there's a fellow on airliners.net who is very critical of PD's financial performance by piecing together their a/c utilization and loads. A shame because I'd much rather Flair go 🞵🞵🞵🞵 up than Porter but....

As someone who does not live in one of three major cities, I would go with Porter over Flair any day. Porter (like Air Canada and WestJet) will see connecting flights. That is critical.

Porter has real cream for your coffee and those almonds dopped with olive oil are excellent. From connections, to seats, to snacks they consistently beat out the WS experience.

I know they are not going to do it but moving some of the Dash-8s to Vancouver would be fantastic.

[VancityAvgeek33]

Originally Posted by RomanR27

Porter appears to be announcing next winters new sun destinations, with routes from YYZ, YOW, YHZ, YHM, and launching sun routes from YEG.

YYZ-AUA
YYZ-SJD
YYZ-MBJ
YYZ-SJO

YOW-AUA
YOW-MBJ
YOW-SJD

YHZ-FLL
YHZ-CUN

YHM-MBJ

The routes from YEG are to PVR, PHX, SJD and LAS

I am shocked YVR didn’t gain anything more from Porter -

[hollywoodcory]

WS starts its first daytime departure to Europe today with 5x weekly YHZ-LIS.

[q12]

Route map updated a few days ago for YHZ:

[RomanR27]

Is YHZ-MCO year round? I was curious which airline served it (my best guess was WestJet) but don't see anything on Google Flights until the end of October.

[q12]

That's a mistake it's currently not year round. Westjet was year round until the recent drop in demand.

I think people would prefer Lisbon or even Paris went year round with Westjet.

[Dominion301]

AC report Q1 2026 results. They managed to eke out a small net profit of $41M for the quarter. That's pretty impressive given the numerous snowstorms in Jan/Feb and then US-Iran late in the quarter with fuel costs skyrocketing.

https://www.aircanada.com/media/air-canada-reports-first-quarter-2026-financial-results/

[VancityAvgeek33]

Does anyone know why there is not year round service between Halifax and Vancouver? But there is between Halifax and Edmonton and Calgary? Would have thought there would be more demand to yvr than yyc and yeg especially in the winter, but then ig there mainly connection airports.

[peytol]

Originally Posted by VancityAvgeek33

Does anyone know why there is not year round service between Halifax and Vancouver? But there is between Halifax and Edmonton and Calgary? Would have thought there would be more demand to yvr than yyc and yeg especially in the winter, but then ig there mainly connection airports.

YYC/YEG are big VFR markets to the east coast, with a decent amount of business fliers (roational workers) then leisure traffic really picks up in the summer, like Vancouver. Not sure what business ties Van has with Halifax and I dont believe there is nearly the population of east coasters vs Alberta.

That map is very impressive for YHZ!

[someone123]

Halifax is actually roughly equidistant between Lisbon and Vancouver. YHZ-YVR is one of the longest domestic flights in the world (not counting various technically domestic flights from European countries to colonial tropical islands).

[Djeffery]

My daughter is looking forward to the YHZ-BCN flight in September, although less excited that it's Westjet. But then she also flew Play and Icelandair the last few years so it shouldn't be too bad for her. She's only doing that the one way, then coming back to Toronto from Rome on AC after her cruise because of work. Otherwise she would have booked the round trip and then figured out a connection from FCO to BCN.

She is really happy that flight exists because she didn't want to deal with the backtracking to the west that Maritimers have had to deal with

[nname]

Originally Posted by VancityAvgeek33

Does anyone know why there is not year round service between Halifax and Vancouver? But there is between Halifax and Edmonton and Calgary? Would have thought there would be more demand to yvr than yyc and yeg especially in the winter, but then ig there mainly connection airports.

AC and WS don't like routes that bypass their hub. AC can feed passengers through YYZ/YUL and WS can feed through YYC, so why bother operate direct route over the bare minimum. There is a reason why WS is able to run 4x daily YYC-YHZ.

Direct quote from AC's earning call from yesterday

We're also proactively reducing lower margin and hub bypass routes and consolidating frequencies where optimal.

YVR-YHZ is a prime example of hub bypass route. The same goes for YVR-YQB or YUL-YYJ, etc. All of those got trimmed in the recent schedule update.

[Dominion301]

Originally Posted by VancityAvgeek33

Does anyone know why there is not year round service between Halifax and Vancouver? But there is between Halifax and Edmonton and Calgary? Would have thought there would be more demand to yvr than yyc and yeg especially in the winter, but then ig there mainly connection airports.

Traffic at YHZ falls off a cliff in winter. YHZ’s August pax count is more than double that of November, January or February. Atlantic Canada airports have large seasonal swings. YHZ historically handles more traffic than YOW in July & August but handles 20% less traffic overall during a full calendar year. Routing YHZ-YVR O&D exclusively via hubs in winter makes complete sense. YHZ-YEG would have quite a bit of oil worker traffic commuting to/from Alberta making it sustainable year-round.

YHZ’s got a mighty impressive route map for a city of barely 1/2 million.

[hollywoodcory]

Eithad has moved up YYC's launch to October 25.

Still planned 4x weekly on the 789.

[SignalHillHiker]

Only thing that surprises me about YHZ is how many NL airports it serves. That's almost as many as own Provincial Airlines service.

Our little official one

[JonToms]

Originally Posted by Dominion301

Traffic at YHZ falls off a cliff in winter. YHZ’s August pax count is more than double that of November, January or February. Atlantic Canada airports have large seasonal swings. YHZ historically handles more traffic than YOW in July & August but handles 20% less traffic overall during a full calendar year. Routing YHZ-YVR O&D exclusively via hubs in winter makes complete sense. YHZ-YEG would have quite a bit of oil worker traffic commuting to/from Alberta making it sustainable year-round.

YHZ’s got a mighty impressive route map for a city of barely 1/2 million.

The difference with YHZ is that it is a regional airport for the Maritimes and to a lesser extent NFLD. The Maritimes have a combined population of approximately 2.2 million and NFLD has another 500,000. There are a lot of people who drive and fly out of Halifax. A place like YOW has a lot of leakage to YUL. YHZ doesn’t have a city like Montreal/ Toronto nearby to loose passengers to. This fact affords YHZ a very impressive route map. It is also helped by the fact that Atlantic Canada is a vey big tourist destination and Halifax is the hub of this business. This is one reason why there is such a large fluctuation between summer and winter traffic numbers. Now with everything going on in the US, YHZ has gained a lot more domestic end European routes as consumers choose not to head to the US.

[Dominion301]

Originally Posted by JonToms

The difference with YHZ is that it is a regional airport for the Maritimes and to a lesser extent NFLD. The Maritimes have a combined population of approximately 2.2 million and NFLD has another 500,000. There are a lot of people who drive and fly out of Halifax. A place like YOW has a lot of leakage to YUL. YHZ doesn’t have a city like Montreal/ Toronto nearby to loose passengers to. This fact affords YHZ a very impressive route map. It is also helped by the fact that Atlantic Canada is a vey big tourist destination and Halifax is the hub of this business. This is one reason why there is such a large fluctuation between summer and winter traffic numbers. Now with everything going on in the US, YHZ has gained a lot more domestic end European routes as consumers choose not to head to the US.

Oh for sure. My main point was the huge seasonal fluctuations at YHZ (and all Atlantic Canada airports for that matter) is far greater than anywhere else in the country. Making a go of YHZ-YVR in winter would be a huge challenge outside of the 2 weeks around the holidays. That city pair’s O&D also contributes to sustaining frequency on all the westbound year-round domestic destinations out of YHZ save for YTZ…maybe someday that’ll also be a transcon connection point.

[Dominion301]

YVR throwback video during Expo '86. In addition to a special BA Concorde visit, there's oodles to cool retro footage, including a Canadian Pacific DC-10 & 737 (sadly no CPAir orange birds) a pair of PW 737s, a Nationair DC-8 at the gate, an AC L15 landing, among others.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comme...rways_concorde_lands_at_yvr_for_expo_86/

[hollywoodcory]

YYC March 2026 Stats:

Domestic: 980,656 +8.9% (YTD: 2,722,828 +4.4%)
Transborder: 266,551 -11.9% (YTD: 741,273 -10.6%)
International: 243,107 +6.7% (YTD: 705,624 +9.6%)

March 2026 Total: 1,490,314 +4.1%

2026 YTD: 4,169,725 +2.2%

[owenf]

Just flew DUB-YYZ on Air Transats A321LR...LF was pretty low in the 50-60s I'd say. Many people had a full row of seats to themselves. Was an enjoyable flight however