Earlier in the year, I thought that I read somewhere that the Shanghai service was being upgraded to an A340, but now it looks like they are staying with the 763 and service is being reduced to five times weekly. Beijing looks like it will stay a daily 763 service.

When I flew over to PEK at the end of August, the plane was surprisingly full. I flew SEA-YVR and I think that almost everyone on board the flight was connecting to AC Asian services (a fog delay forced connection annoucements). There were something like 12 for Beijing, 9 for Narita, 7 for Taipei etc. If there is indeed a lot of USA-Asia service through YVR, I would assume that most AC Asian service would be fine. Plus, AC is really competitive (cheap!) out of the states for all advance bookings.