I flew on Canada’s longest domestic flight! This took 6 hours of flying on a 737 MAX,
from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Vancouver, British Columbia.
Now that being said, this is the longest domestic flight that a Canadian airline
currently flies. There are a few others that come close, like WestJet’s St. John’s
to Calgary flight. That would have taken me straight home, but as anyone who’s
watched my videos for any length of time knows , that’s not nearly overly-complicated enough.
So with that, good morning from Halifax Stanfield International Airport! My
name is Alex, and I’m about to spend a whole lot of time on an Air Canada 737.
The Halifax to Vancouver route is a fairly new one for AC,
who only launched it just this summer. WestJet has flown it for a couple years though.
On their site, Air Canada schedules the flight as being 6 and a half hours long. In practice,
the flight time is usually 6 hours on the nose, give or take a few minutes.
So, after crossing the country one highly unnecessary way,
I decided to “treat” myself to the nonstop flight back to Western Canada.
Halifax Stanfield is Atlantic Canada’s busiest airport, and, I gotta say, looks pretty nice.
One big thing I like is the fact that they have an actual observation deck in the pre-security area.
Now it’s obviously not ideal for photos, but you do get a decent view outside,
and I, for one, wish more Canadian airports would go to that effort!
Although I’m flying in Economy today, my first stop after security was the Halifax
Maple Leaf Lounge, with many thanks to a very generous viewer who sent
me a couple extra lounge passes! You know who you are, and those were greatly appreciated.
AC’s Maple Leaf Lounge in Halifax isn’t the largest,
but it had lots of seats and was pretty quiet this morning.
It also has quite a nice view of the ramp,
which was pretty similar to the observation deck from before.
As far as the food options went though,
there wasn’t a ton. On the one side, they had some yogurt, muffins, eggs,
fruit, and granola bars, while on the other they had some oatmeal and cereal.
Although it feels a little bit low-effort,
free food is free food, so it was still a decent breakfast.
One perk of this lounge is it does have a few seats with only a single pane of glass
looking directly outside. That left me with a great view of our plane for today’s flight,
this Boeing 737 MAX 8 registered as Charlie Golf Echo Lima Quebec.
This was one of the MAXs built for Air Canada right when the grounding happened,
and is technically 3 years old despite being newly delivered in May of this year.
That particular seat kept me occupied for the next little bit,
with more excellent views of the Trans-Canada Air Lines retro A220, and this Air Canada Cargo 767.
I eventually made my way to the gate, and realized staying in the lounge for as long as possible was
definitely the right call since it’s one of those gates where you can’t actually see the plane.
Still, it was good to be going home, or at least in that direction,
after a full week of hopping between cities… and countries.
Boarding soon started about 20 minutes late, and I made my way to today’s ride across Canada.
My seat for today is 15F, a Preferred seat in the front half of the cabin.
The Preferred seats on Air Canada’s MAXes all have substantially more
legroom than the normal ones. That is an absolute necessity on this flight,
and this one also had a decent side-on view of the engine.
Interestingly, the 737 MAX has a much higher ratio of Preferred to Standard seats than any
other plane in the Air Canada fleet. Whether or not that was intentional, based on the long
routes that this plane flies, it definitely works out nicely for a flight like this.
With a very full flight, boarding eventually finished up,
and here’s the departure from Halifax, off of runway 23.
Canada’s longest domestic flight covers a whopping 4,441 kilometres,
passing over 8 Canadian provinces and one American state.
Air Canada’s newer narrowbody Economy seats all have these small-ish tray tables that can
be adjusted. In the seatback pocket was the usual safety card, which I’ve just realized looks quite
Airbus-like, and the air sickness bag. Gotta say though, I kinda miss the paper copies of
AC’s enRoute magazines. Especially since it’s been two and a half years at this point, and the
fact that the lack of magazines has outlived the CleanCare kits, it’d be nice to see them return.
There are two power ports available for every 3 seats,
as well as another USB port underneath the in-flight entertainment screen.
Air Canada’s newest iteration of their IFE is excellent, with lots to choose from.
It also made abundantly clear just how much time we’d be spending with them today.
In case that wasn’t enough, the moving map really puts this into perspective.
Still, one thing about this flight is that it is one of the few ways for you
to see almost every Canadian geographic region in one go.
Eventually, the crew started the on-board service,
and handed out these paper menus to anyone who was interested in buying something.
I had pre-purchased one of the special meal boxes,
but for some reason that wasn’t available, so they let me have my pick of the menu.
I had the Montréal smoked meat sandwich and the “wild rice superfood salad” that
was actually surprisingly decent. The sandwich itself was also tasty enough,
and that was soon followed by not one but two choices of drinks.
Now, I know you don’t ever get free food on AC domestic flights in Economy,
but considering this is literally the longest one, you’d think there’d at least be some free snacks.
It’s kinda funny when you think about it because
it’s actually longer than some of their transatlantic MAX flights.
Then again, with the sheer lack of galley space that AC gives the poor cabin crew,
maybe that just isn’t possible.
On the MAXs, the Economy Class lavatories are both located right in the back galley,
and have an okay amount of space.
The Air Canada 737 MAX seats 169 passengers, with 12 seats up front in Business, and 153 in Economy.
In booking this flight, I, for the first time ever, actually paid for a Comfort Economy fare,
which is a bit more than the usual standard or flex ones.
However, that was 100% worth it, because it included a free Preferred seat, which would
have cost $128 otherwise. It also included 125% Aeroplan points and some other perks,
which on a flight this long, definitely adds up.
Another thing that adds up on a flight like this, are the leg cramps you’d get from sitting in the
normal economy seats for this long. Air Canada’s Preferred Seats have around 33-34” of pitch and I
still needed to put my bag in the overhead bin just to have more space for my legs.
The normal Economy seats only have 30” of pitch, which,
for the long routes that these planes fly, is not a whole lot.
Plus, the 737’s slightly narrower cabin becomes quite noticeable after the first 4 hours or so,
and you become hyper-aware of exactly where your shoulders are touching.
We made a couple deviations for weather near the Manitoba/Saskatchewan border
to avoid some… Unfriendly clouds reaching as high up as we were.
Around this point, I was starting to get a teensy bit bored, and as you do,
thought about some other ludicrously long Canadian domestic flights you could do.
From what I can tell, it seems like St. John’s to Burwash,
Yukon would be the longest possible one within Canada, if you had a plane with both the range
and the ability to land on gravel. St. John’s to Whitehorse would be just a bit shorter than that.
Practically speaking though, the only flight that you might see longer than
this current one would be St. John’s to Vancouver, adding another 581 kilometres.
It’s worth mentioning that the crew did keep us hydrated throughout, and
came around a couple times with cups of water.
Even so, as we approach the Rockies and fly directly over home,
it’s worth reflecting on this route in general.
6 hours on a 737 these days is not actually that long in most cases.
With the MAXs being able to consistently fly transatlantic,
you can find quite a few flights longer than this. Icelandair’s 7.5 hour flight from Keflavik
to Seattle is a good example, even if the MAX is slightly less comfortable than its peers.
At the same time though, it’s worth looking back at this same route over
100 years ago. In October 1920 a group of Canadian aviation pioneers
flew the first ever trans-Canada flight from Halifax to Vancouver.
That journey took over 10 days using a relay of several different aircraft,
in some very challenging conditions.
The fact that that has now been reduced to just 6 hours speaks volumes to how
much commercial aviation has advanced in the last century.
So as uncomfortable as 6 plus hours on a 737 might seem, I think Canadians are pretty fortunate to
even have that option today. Will I be going out of my way to do this again? Probably not… Until
someone launches Vancouver to St. John’s and the premise of this entire video is outdated.
Nevertheless, it’s one of those Canadian aviation boxes to tick off, and I’m glad I can say,
for however long this may be the case, that I’ve flown on Canada’s longest domestic flight.
So, with 4,000 kilometres behind me and another 5 time zones flown through,
I’m back roughly where I started just over a week ago on the Dash 8 trip.
Just as I said in that video, this flight from Halifax to Vancouver
was another great way to see our country from the air, just quite a bit faster.
All in all, this whole trilogy, if you can even call it that, was one of the coolest
things I’ve ever done. Getting to see all these new parts of Canada, a tiny piece of France,
and flying across the country twice is not something you get to do very often.
So, thank you very much for joining me on these last couple of trips,
and I’ll see you in the next one.