While it has been a tough period for the airline industry, we’re seeing a surprising number of new airline startups. For example, this spring we saw both Avelo Airlines and Breeze Airways launch.
Continue reading: Connect Airlines: North America’s Odd New Airline
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
You wrote turboprop as "truboprop"!
(feel free to delete my comment once fixed)
Ben, I think they are going to try to break even on flights out of YTZ but they’ll be flying much more domestically in the USA. Given that the crew bases are in Canada, presumably they are being paid in Canadian Dollars, ergo every flight that doesn’t touch down in Canada has a 25% labour cost savings. They are leveraging the Canadian dollar to give themselves an advantage over other US Airlines and the YTZ flights are purely to meet regulatory requirements. Interesting setup.
Perhaps they believe it’ll be cheaper to have pilots and flight attendants on CAD salaries and commute the plane down to the States to operate during the day?
Don’t hold your breath on an AA codeshare… Speaking from experience AA is the absolute worst carrier to establish a partnership with, technology and procedure -wise. Everything is their way or nothing at all, and with Connect Airlines on a very basic PSS offering almost entirely outsourced, it will be hilarious to watch play out.
Agreed, it’s a mysterious business plan. At least Porter has a loyalty base and YTZ can hub for the other Canadian cities it serves.
Also wondering, YTZ is a small airport. How many gates does it have? I guess I could look that up. But it’s such a small airport how can it handle Porter and AC operations, along with Connect?
Being a US airline, they can even sell connections (e.g. BOS-YTZ-SYR) through YTZ without violating cabotage rules.
From what I can see, YTZ has 11 gates, it currently has 3 airlines ( Porter, AC, and GTA(Greater Toronto Airlines)), it can still handle Connect Airlines, though I don't know how successful the airline would be. It would have to add more flights to the US from YTZ than currently.
Pilots will be 90% US Pilots as many Canadian Pilots do not meet the requirements under the FARS/FAA as they are much higher than Canadian regs.
Well, perhaps there are other underserved airports within... or maybe just outside... the GTA... to the west 😉
Shut down twice by the FAA due serious safety issues. Poor management team is part of the problem.