Storm & Pearson Incident Result in Nearly 1,300 Air Canada Cancellations
by Bruce Parkinson
Air Canada flight attendants will vote on a strike mandate next week.
Air Canada has issued update on its operations after recent severe winter storm activity in Eastern Canada and a major aircraft incident reduced capacity at its Toronto Pearson global hub.
“As a result of the recent storm and the incident at Toronto Pearson, there have been extensive delays and Air Canada has cancelled approximately 1,290 flights over the past six days,” said Craig Landry, EVP and Chief Operating Officer at Air Canada.
“Despite this, we successfully and safely moved more than 650,000 customers during that time. We are currently restoring our service, adding extra flights and capacity where possible. However, the necessary and ongoing reductions in the number of take-offs and landings permitted at our global hub in Toronto is slowing the speed of recovery. We anticipate it may take several more days, depending on the weather, to return to fully normal operations,” Landry added.
Air Canada reduced its schedule in anticipation of the weather limiting the number of flights permitted to take off and land at major airports. For example, at Toronto Pearson approximately 44 flights are normally allowed to take-off each hour, but with recent conditions the number of movements has been restricted to as few as 16 per hour.
The airline says this was done for safety reasons, including to give the airport time to remove snow and ice. As a result of the storm and the aircraft incident, Air Canada had to further remove flights from its already reduced schedule. These are now being restored as conditions allow.
To give some context, Toronto and Montreal are Air Canada’s two largest hubs. On an average day, approximately 47% of Air Canada’s flights and 46% of its customers pass through Toronto Pearson.
Because many of its aircraft and customers connect through Toronto at some point in the day, a disruption at Pearson can impact flights elsewhere in the system, creating a domino effect that can also impact flights not immediately travelling to or from Toronto.
