British Columbia is Canada’s westernmost province, situated on the Pacific coast,
and is home to roughly 5 million people. Canada’s second busiest airport is also located here,
with Air Canada having a large presence at Vancouver International Airport, or YVR.
Now, British Columbia is also home to some of the shortest commercial flights in North America,
specifically, those between Vancouver, and Vancouver Island.
Vancouver to Victoria, the province’s capital, is just a 63 kilometre flight, while Vancouver to
Nanaimo further north is even shorter at just over 50 kilometres! These two routes are the shortest
ones in the entire Air Canada network, serving the 800,000 people who live on Vancouver Island.
Of course, it’s worth mentioning right away that Air Canada isn’t the only airline
that flies these routes - WestJet also flies Vancouver to Victoria and Nanaimo,
while Pacific Coastal and Air North, also fly between Vancouver and Victoria.
On these flights, Air Canada and WestJet use 78-seat Dash 8-400s operated by Jazz and WestJet
Encore, respectively. Air Canada and WestJet also fly directly from Victoria and Nanaimo
to their other hubs across the country, including Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto.
Pacific Coastal uses 19-seat Beechcraft 1900s,
with the occasional flight from a larger 34-seat Saab 340.
Air North uses their Boeing 737-400 and 737-500s, which seat 156 and 122 passengers, respectively.
In the case of Air North though, they operate the Vancouver to Victoria
leg as part of a triangle routing, flying from Whitehorse to Victoria,
then to Vancouver, then back to Whitehorse, or vice versa.
There’s also Harbour Air and Helijet, which connect the Island to the mainland from Victoria
and Nanaimo Harbours. Harbour Air flies a fleet of floatplanes, from the De Havilland Beaver to
the Twin Otter, and Helijet, as you might’ve guessed, uses Sikorsky S-76 helicopters.
As you can see, these short routes are some of the busiest in the country, with dozens
of flights a day from several different airlines crossing the Strait of Georgia,
the gap between the island and the mainland.
Now, having said all that, you may be thinking - “Alex, you do see all that water in between,
right? Seems pretty clear why these are busy routes to begin with.”
And yes, obviously, the government of BC doesn’t expect people to swim across
the Strait of Georgia every time they want to go to IKEA,
and that’s where this becomes an interesting discussion on the province’s infrastructure.
As it stands, the vast majority of traffic between the island and the mainland uses BC
Ferries, which provides ferry service all along the BC coastline.
In 2019, BC Ferries carried over 18 million passengers and 7 million vehicles
across their entire network, with roughly half of those passengers just being between
Vancouver and Victoria and Vancouver and Nanaimo. That said, they’re not the fastest
mode of transport out there, with most of these crossings taking 90 minutes or more.
Some sort of fixed link between the island and the mainland would undoubtedly be a time saver,
and it’s a question that comes up often enough that the provincial
government found it necessary to make a webpage on that exact topic.
According to B.C. Transportation, there are some notable engineering challenges with any bridge
or tunnel in the Strait of Georgia, including seismic activity, high winds and waves, depths
of water up to 365 metres, and soft sediment on the ocean bed making a tunnel difficult to bore.
Those factors all combined make building a fixed road link a definite challenge,
both physically and financially.
The ferries may take longer and have their own costs associated with them, but the provincial
government says that, in order to recoup the estimated $15 billion dollar cost of construction,
the tolls on this potential fixed link would be 6 to 10 times that of current ferry prices.
So, going back to the air travel aspect - these Air Canada and WestJet flights across
the Strait do make up most of the commercial traffic at Victoria and Nanaimo Airports,
but they’re not necessarily made up of travellers just flying to and from the mainland.
For one thing, it’s not exactly inexpensive to do so.
Looking at a random date a couple months from the time of uploading, both Air Canada and WestJet
charge $170 Canadian dollars for a one way flight from Victoria to Vancouver.
In comparison, a ferry ride between the same two cities costs $17.60 per person, plus $59.50
for a vehicle, one way. For a flight that can be as short as 10 or 15 minutes, it may be worth it
for the business traveller, but it’s certainly not that appealing to the general population .
And of course, there’s also the matter of baggage, going through security,
and so on. Passengers have to weigh that investment in both time and money,
not to mention transportation at their destination, with just taking the ferry instead.
Granted, airfares within Canada are substantially higher than in most other countries anyway,
but that’s a discussion for another time.
With that, you begin to see why airlines like Harbour Air, which fly mainly out of
smaller terminals in harbours, have been able to carve out a niche for themselves.
Realistically though, most of the travellers using the major airlines
are likely connecting onwards through Vancouver,
whether it’s to another destination in Canada or to another continent entirely. Price-wise,
when you add in that onward connection, things start to look a little bit more reasonable.
In the meantime though, Vancouver Island residents will have to continue using BC Ferries for their
trips to the mainland, or take these super short flights to travel onwards from Vancouver.
So, even if a fixed road link is built to Vancouver Island long off in the future,
it seems safe to say that Air Canada’s shortest flights will stick around.
This video wouldn’t have been possible without the help of my good friend Brandon Siska,
who generously provided much of the footage you saw from Victoria Airport, the ferries, and more.
Do go check out his channel and his Instagram, which I’ve linked in the description below.
Thank you so much for watching this video, and I will see you next time.