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Air Canada resumes daily London-Toronto flights as airport begins recovery

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London International Airport is a long way from being the hub it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, but this week it took an important step toward its potential recovery.

Monday marked the return of daily Air Canada flights at the London airport suspended since early April, when the pandemic forced the cancellation of most flights across the country.

“In our minds, this is the start of our recovery,” Mike Seabrook, the airport’s chief executive, said on Monday.

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“We’re thrilled to see them come back.”

Air Canada has added two daily flights in and out of London to and from Toronto, with a third daily departure being added next week. They join the three or four flights a week now being offered by WestJet, also to Toronto.

The return of the flights is one of the early signs the worst of the economic impact caused by the pandemic may be behind, Seabrook said.

But he’s quick to admit it will take some time before the London airport reaches the levels of passenger traffic it saw in 2019, a record year for the organization.

“We’re not getting ahead of ourselves,” he said. “We realize we’re in for some tough months ahead.”

Among other things, the pandemic forced officials to trim the airport’s budget and postpone some capital projects, as passenger traffic fell by 90 per cent.

Officials estimated about 50 people flew Monday through the airport.

Among those flying Monday was Joann Wilson, who flew to London to visit her son from Winnipeg.

It was her first time flying since the pandemic was declared, but Wilson said she wasn’t overly concerned about getting on a plane again.

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“Everybody is wearing masks and using hand sanitizer and people are keeping their distance and respecting each other’s space,” she said.

For her, the small number of people in airports made for a comfortable flying experience, Wilson said.

“The airports are quite empty and everything is running on time,” she said. “It’s very easy to stay away from anybody because there aren’t that many people to begin with.”

In total, officials expect about 700 will have flown through the London airport by the end of the week.

That’s still a far cry from the about 2,500 passengers the airport handled daily before the pandemic hit.

And not all airlines are ready to return just yet.

For instance, discount carrier Swoop, which flew six times a week out of London to Halifax and Edmonton, and daily between London and Abbotsford, B.C., recently announced it won’t have flights in or out of the Forest City until Oct. 24.

If coronavirus infection rates remain under control and there isn’t a second wave, Seabrook believes the London airport could be operating at 50 per cent capacity by the end of the year.

Next year, he would expect to be closer to 2019 levels, when more than 683,000 passengers flew through London, an increase of 27 per cent over 2018.

“There’s no way we could do that this year,” he said. The pandemic “really set us back, but it’s happened to all airports and almost worldwide, so we really have to just deal with the issues in front of us.”

“We think we’ve got the fundamentals correct to make the airport continue to grow, so we’re going to be determined to get it back to where it was,” Seabrook said.

jjuha@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/JuhaatLFPress

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