Air Canada rouge resumes scheduled pax operations

Air Canada rouge (RV, Toronto Pearson) restarted scheduled passenger operations on November 2, 2020, after having been dormant since late March of this year. The LCC’s inagural service – from Toronto Pearson to Cancún – was operated with an A321-200, C-GJTX (msn 7650). “Air Canada rouge remains an important part of our overall strategy in rebuilding Air Canada’s global network. As leisure traffic resumes, we will progressively add Air Canada rouge to select North American leisure markets from Eastern Canada,” Air Canada’s Vice President (Network Planning and Alliances), Mark Gallardo, said. In May, the Canadian carrier announced that rouge would become a narrowbody-only operator with a fleet consisting exclusively of A320 Family aircraft. Its twenty-two B767-300(ER)s will be retired, although the airline said that it was still possible that they would be briefly reactivated prior to their eventual phase-out if demand justified it. The carrier’s narrowbody fleet currently comprises sixteen A319-100s, five A320-200s, and fourteen A321-200s. According to the ch-aviation schedules module, the low-cost arm of Air Canada (AC, Montréal Trudeau) plans to serve six destinations in the Caribbean, two in the United States (Orlando Int’l and Fort Lauderdale Int’l), and one each in Mexico and Costa Rica in the first phase of its relaunch. All flights will operate out of Toronto. Air Canada rouge confirmed that despite plans to retire the B767s, it intends to return to the transatlantic market using narrowbody aircraft in the future. While most European countries allow travellers from Canada to enter (contrary to those arriving from the US), Canada itself retains strict border controls and bans entry for nearly all travellers from abroad, although it does not require returning Canadian residents to quarantine or undergo testing.