(07-25-2015, 10:06 AM)BuildingScout Wrote: This would be true if SFO was a destination only. However it is also a hub. By my estimation there are somewhere between 15 to 40 daily trips from RoW with SFO as a destination, to which we need to add people connecting on to Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Hawaii, Philippines, and Australia. This can easily fill to capacity a CRJ200/LR every day of the week or a CRJ705 at 80-90%.
Those 15 to 40 daily trips from RoW to SFO happen throughout the day to synch up with connecting flights at the SFO (or other) hub airport. (Who's going to fly YKF to SFO direct on a morning flight if their flight out of SFO happens that evening when they could instead get a more conveniently-scheduled afternoon flight from YYZ to SFO?) So to make a YKF to SFO route practical you'd need 2 or 3 flights per day.
That said, I don't know flight schedule patterns at SFO. Prehaps they follow some pattern analogous to eastern NA flights for European destinations that tend to leave late in the afternoon or early in the evening so as to arrive in the morning in Europe. I could see how an afternoon flight from YKF to say JFK might attract enough people who want to connect to European flights without them having to spend hours cooling their heels in a US-embargoed lounge. Is that also the situation with flights out of SFO?