This made the rounds of the local facebook groups recently. It shows the cod fish trade between western Newfoundland and California in the 1980s. Air Canada ran a freight service from Stephenville to Los Angeles via Toronto. The airport portion starts around the 7 minute mark. Neat to see the old Air Canada livery and a jet freight service from YJT.
• Video Link
Of course, in the past 2 weeks, Provincial Airlines announced it is pulling out of Stephenville leaving our airport without regularly scheduled service from November to April. YJT is essentially on life support right now and is being propped up to the tune of about $750,000 per year by the municipal government. It's sad because Provincial ran their service here into the ground. They priced Stephenville flights at $80 more than Deer Lake flights, cut them back to one per day, and then 1 every second day, then twice per week and frequently cancelled them. I fly to St. John's 3-4 time per year for work and coworkers in St. John's frequently fly out here, but over the past 2 years it's been almost impossible to fly because of the poor schedule. We either have to drive 2 hours to Deer Lake and go from there or drive the 8 hours to St. John's.
Just for example: I have to go to St. John's for 3 days in November (Wednesday to Friday). I can fly from YJT on Wednesday morning but there's no return flight until the following Monday. So I'm driving. I could fly the return leg from YYT to Halifax with Porter, change planes and come into YJT on Saturday, but that's alot of going to avoid an 8 hour drive. 3 others from the office are also going, but because of the lack of flights we're just going to do a group road trip.
It wasn't long ago that PAL was doing 7000 pax per year between YJT and YYT. This year they did just 150. Hoping another airline can see the potential here and put a small commuter flight from YJT to YYT and YYR (Goose Bay)
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