Air Canada A319 At LHR TODAY

[ukdean]

Interesting to see the above Airbus operating as AC823 to St Johns out of Heathrow this afternoon.

Anyone have any more info ie, why a 319, i take it this is a new flight for Air Canada. With the amount of runway used i take it she was full of fuel. Not sure what the range it but it was good to see her a long way from home.

[Doors to Automatic]

St Johns is only in the region of 5 hours so it is well within the range of this aircraft.

Likely to be fairly full of fuel but with 12000ft of runway to play with I would be surprised if the take-off was not de-rated, hence the long roll.

[ukdean]

Interesting that Air Canada have decided to put a 319 on the route when i understand it was a 767 before.

I wounder what the AC view is.

[AircraftOperations]

Thought they've done this route with the A319 in previous years?

Stand to be corrected though - maybe it was a different route that the A319 was used on.

[BAAdboy]

A 767 was used on this route when St. Johns was the first stop and Halifax was the ultimate destination. AC then started to operate to Halifax only and dropped direct service to YYT but restored direct service on a Summer only seasonal basis in 2007, using the 319.

Having flown the LHR-YYT-YHZ route myself many times, it typically seemed like about half the passengers disembarked at St. Johns so a 319 would seem to be a reasonable fit to demand while keeping the service cost effective, at least during the summer months.

[raffele]

If BA can take a 318 from London to New York non stop (ok - there's a fuelling stop at Shannon but that's because of the diddy runway at City) then AC taking a 319 to the nearest edge of Canada to us doesn't seem too silly!

[Dave Clarke Fife]

Saw it on stand today...................C-GITR

[Skipness One Echo]

It was actually dropped for a while as the A319 used to arrive late in the afternoon and be the last AC flight out of the day so timings weren't ideal. However it now has a more traditional timing so is something a little different.

The Newfoundland locals were PARTICULARLY upset when Air Canada dropped this route as they felt pretty isolated from the rest of Canada at the best of times so there a lot of pressure for a rethink. I hope it does well on the A319.

[WHBM]

St Johns, Newfoundland, is actually not that far from the UK. In the days when they used to stop at Prestwick on the way to Newfoundland (many of the residents there have Scottish or Irish roots) it was little more than 4 hours flying. In fact it's closer to Prestwick than Larnaca is. Nobody would say that an A319 could not get from Scotland to Cyprus.

St Johns is a relatively recent transatlantic gateway, right into the 1980s Air Canada flights from the UK to Newfoundland operated through Gander instead, in the centre of the province and miles from anywhere. Only in more recent times were they transferred to the capital city, St Johns.

These were a B767 operation from London through St Johns to Halifax, Nova Scotia. None of these were B767 crew bases and the aircraft had to continue to Toronto. Multi-stop flights are rarely economic and have pretty much disappeared from schedules. The one time I took it eastbound, returning from Newfoundland after New Year, they were overbooked on arrival from Halifax and pax were having to be rerouted the next day via Montreal, a very long way round. I suspect the whole operation was a significant operational inconvenience.

The first separate A319 operation a couple of years ago could only get evening slots at Heathrow so operated a daylight flight eastbound, and got back to St Johns around midnight, missing connections both ways to other Newfoundland/Labrador points, and also from Heathrow onward to Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, etc. It was thus not surprising it was a failure, for many of these other connecting points at both ends it was still quicker to go through Halifax. Hopefully the new service will last better.