Air Canada did not respond to Contrarian's invitation to explain its price gouging on the Halifax-Sydney run, where it often costs more to get off in Halifax than to fly on to Toronto or St. John's (original complaint here). However, an Air Canada employee has argued forcefully that Sydney Airport (now called J. A. Douglas McCurdy Airport) "has extremely high fees and rents even for a Canadian Airport." I challenged my correspondent for specifics, and he responded: I called the YQY airport and asked how much it cost to land an airplane. There does not seem to be anything published. [An employee] said it...

Contrarian's aviation guru, Adrian Noskwith, thinks the Porter Airlines 50%-off sale may have played a role in the weird pricing I encountered flying from Toronto to Sydney (as Joe MacKay argued), but it's not the whole story. Airline pricing is a weird science at the best of times. When Porter is whipping Air Canada's ass out of Toronto Island, as they are at the moment, this drives airline pricing executives to do even weirder things. But why is it consistently cheaper to fly from Sydney to St. Johns (via Halifax) than from Sydney to Halifax? To check this claim, I priced one-way Air Canada...

I am posting from the tarmac at Montréal-Trudeau  Airport, part way through the strangely priced Air Canada flight I wrote about here. Contrarian reader Joe MacKay offers a plausible if partial explanation for Air Canada's charging more for a Halifax-Sydney ticket than the Toronto-Sydney ticket I'm flying on, even though the Halifax-Sydney leg is the same flight on the same plane I'll be taking. I think this was a side effect of a Porter sale. Porter ran 50% off flights from the Island briefly a week or so ago. Air Canada responded (as they do) with a predatory sale on all bookings...