(06-26-2019, 12:43 PM)KevinL Wrote: It's a catch-22. Accessibility to the airport is poor because there are too few flights; new flights aren't coming because accessibility is poor. And so on.
I don't think this is true. I believe a bunch of the flights that were cancelled had high seat occupancy. It was just the overall economics of the route that made it not worthwhile for these companies. I believe the AA flight to Chicago was heavily used - but AA found a more profitable route in the US driven in large part by the poor Canadian -> US exchange rate. I also believe the Ottawa flight was cancelled because of the economics on the Ottawa end and not here.
I like the general approach of the Master plan -> Laying out what they want to do to expand and tying it to passenger numbers. But I'm not sure if there's been a good public explanation* for what the main road blocks are to getting more flights here. My intuition though is that its not really about facilities, runways, or other things covered in the master plan (at least, not yet).
* If there has been, I'd love to read it.