Wow! And I thought we got somewhat uncivil in our comments to one another. Nothing compared to the blood flowing across those pages! Kinda explains the tone from a couple of our airline employee posters, but even they are civil compared to those posting to Pprune.

Though I must say, while most might consider AC a monopoly, one of the biggest things it continues to face is an erosion of market share from low cost carriers and charters. Certainly the US market has never had to deal with domestic charter carriers who fly virtual scheduled daily services on the major bread and butter routes. In defence of AC, the Canadian market is far less than 10% the size of the US one, has longer average route distances to cover, and has only two major high-density transcon routes. Compare this to the US where there are at least 25 point-to-point centres that generate as many passenger miles/revenue as YYZ-YVR or YYZ-YYC, our only two major transcon routes. There are over 50 city pairs with greater passenger densities than those secondary ones here: YYZ-YWG, YYZ-YEG and YYZ-YHZ. We have two shuttle corridors [YVR-YYC-YEG and YYZ-YOW-YUL] which may just come up to match the economies of scale found in the NYC-WAS-BOS or LAX-SFO corridors. WestJet decimated CP's hold on the western corridor [helped by AC's beefed up sked a few years earlier] and also undermined one of its domestic profit bases. Royal/C3000 might just be doing this to AC on the central Canada shuttle.

The whole economic model in Canada is so very different from below the border.

That Sephen Wolf rumour is interesting, though. But I am not sure AC could afford him. And who said we shareholders love Milton?

Interesting this is a pilot's site. I consider the pilots to be one of the biggest problems in the Canadian civil aviation industry, and AC's among the worst offenders when it comes to undermining the viability of that company. Who really runs AC: Robert Milton or Ray Hall?