Resource development in northern B.C and a growing tourism sector provincewide is helping to fuel a rise in charter flightsand the addition of new scheduled routes for small airlines.
However, with opportunity also comes competition.
“Business is steady, not booming, because as soon as other companies heard about the opportunity, everybody jumped into the market,” Central Mountain Air co-owner Douglas McRae told Business in Vancouver. “We've got our fair share of the business, but there are a pile of airplanes flying around northern B.C.”
He pointed to increased competition from airlines such as Kelowna-based charter airline Flair Air, Calgary-based Canadian North, Fort St. John-based North Cariboo Air and Sunwest Aviation, which has several hubs across Western Canada.
Bigger players have similarly sought northern B.C. aviation business.
Air Canada (TSX:AC.B), for example, has added capacity to Fort St. John to compete with WestJet Airlines (TSX:WJA), which last year launched new direct flights between Fort St. John and both Vancouver and Calgary.
Much of Central Mountain Air's business comes out of Vancouver International Airport, where the 16-plane airline has increased its outbound seats 17.5% to 91,113 in the year that ended June 30.
McRae and partner Lindsay Clougher also own the four-plane Hawk Air and the seven-plane Northern Thunderbird Air.
“Resource development in northern B.C. has definitely shifted our business mix between our scheduled operations and our charter operations,” said Hawk Air's director of corporate services, Jocelyn Lebell.
She estimated that a couple of years ago about 90% of her airline's business would have been scheduled. That percentage has dropped to about 70% in the past year as charter flight demand has surged.
Hawk Air's charter business is fuelled by more than northern B.C. resource development.
The most recent PKF Consulting Inc. data shows that hotel occupancy across B.C. is up an average of about 3.3 percentage points to 60.6% in the first half of 2014.
“At this time of year there's fishing charters to lodges,” said Kevin Boothroyd, director of sales and marketing at Pacific Coastal Airlines (PCA). “Much of that is out of our seaplane base out of Port Hardy.”
Boothroyd said his airline has had substantial growth in chartered flights as well as in the overall number of passengers in the past few months.
That increase, however, follows a slump in 2013.
Vancouver International Airport Authority statistics show that PCA had a 10.2% drop in outbound seats out of Vancouver International Airport (YVR) in the year that ended June 30, compared with the previous year.
Some of that drop came because the airline was using more appropriately sized planes while sometimes operating fewer but fuller flights.
“Outbound seats is not the same as passenger travel,” Boothroyd stressed. “This year we've done a better job at managing our capacity and rightsizing our capacity in the market.”
Former Bella Coola truck logger Daryl Smith founded PCA four decades ago and has built the company to be the sixth-largest carrier out of YVR in terms of outbound seats and the third-largest carrier ranked by takeoffs and landings.
New scheduled routes that the company has added in the past year include one between Cranbrook and Kelowna and another between Campbell River and Bella Bella.
The company's wheel-based division is based at YVR's south terminal and has routes to 14 other airports. Its other main division is seaplanes, based in Port Hardy.
Float plane competitors, such as Harbour Air, are also coasting on rising tourism and general increase in demand. Harbour Air plans to launch, on September 22, a 35-minute flight between Pitt Meadows Regional Airport and downtown Victoria that operates twice daily, seven days each week.
