Strive
Up until the beginning of December the flight routed via Vancouver because the Americans were making it too hard to route through Anchorage. They were insisting all pax, baggage and cargo be offloaded, pax to have visas and recheck in, and cargo checked. Obviously this was unacceptable to CX, as the process would take about three hours. Anchorage was loosing big time and after a large amount of pressure was place on Washington and the Department of Homeland Security by the Alaskan Government, sanity finally prevailed.
As to the reason why we don’t do Toronto non-stop like Air Canada? They are using the A340-500, which has a greater range. The A340-300 can do it but there is a substantial payload penalty. Where we may miss out on a few pax because of the longer flight time we more than make up for in the additional freight we can carry compared to Air Canada. There is a lot more money to be made in freight and the bean counters at CX know it.