Good late night and happy birthday to myself from Montreal, Canada 🇨🇦 after a long day of exploring the city even meeting up with a cousin I’ve never meet yesterday night. It’s time to head “home” to Keswick where all our belongings are and we are initially staying in. So after a somewhat short drive from a nice Italian restaurant 🇮🇹 we have arrived at Montreal’s Trudeau airport which I gotta say it’s really nice. Even the domestic terminal here that Air Canada uses, Torontos looks better for sure but this one is definitely still nice looking, security did take some time thanks to a lot of passengers in the checkpoint due to this being peak hour here at YUL but not having to drop off bags definitely saved us some time. Thanks to a fairly long security check and the fact that the terminal was so packed that we could barely move around, we didn’t have to wait long at all for boarding.
FLIGHT INFO:
Origin: Montreal-Pierre Elliot Trudeau 🇨🇦 (CYUL)
Destination: Toronto Pearson Intl 🇨🇦 (CYYZ)
Flight Time: 0:56
Airbus A220-300 (Air Canada)
Server: Expert
Here at our gate is C-GJXV a 4 year old Airbus A220-300 delivered to Air Canada on March 10th, 2020 only 3 days before the pandemic and this aircraft was built not too far from here in Mirabel airport which was the former airport serving Montreal but was soon replaced by the current Trudeau airport we are in right now. But thankfully the field did find another purpose instead of becoming a wasteland.
Air Canada has a total of 137 seats on their A200-300s 12 in domestic first and 125 in the standard economy cabin, up in business you can find Collins Aerospace MiQ cradle seats in the standard 2-2 configuration. And behind that is the strange 2-3 arranged economy class using Collins Meridian Slimlines. My seat will just be a bit past the wing in 25F which does come with an entertainment screen and Wi-Fi more on that later of course and as expected from a modern airliner, seats do meet the current standards which is a good thing but soon it was time to pushback and make our way to runway 06R for take off.
Bye bye, Montreal!
A right side view gave us an INCREDIBLE view over the city, yeah I wasn’t here for long but I wish I was and if I get the chance I would especially in the winter! ❄️
Despite a pretty short flight time tonight, we actually reach 32,000ft for our cruise and like I expected based on my previous inter Canada short haul flights, there was no service tonight but the crew were fantastic and even invited me to visit the cockpit after the flight so I’ll still give them 1 star ⭐️ the actual service is lacking them behind but this cool opportunity is worth something. Now onto the IFE which has me interested, on board we can find the Panasonic eX1 system which was just much better than the previous system we saw on their old A319s I’d maybe say it’s better than the IFE system on American Airlines but I still think AA provides more content. I put on a few South Park episodes to spend the time and like always I skipped Wi-Fi which the Intelsat 2Ku-band satellite wifi is used to provide the internet connection. Out the window we can see Ottawa, which compared to popular belief is the actual capital of Canada 🇨🇦
I’ve done a whole lot of short flights and they truly don’t get any longer and it was soon time for decent, we came in pretty much straight forward towards the city just with a slight turn to land on YYZs RWY 24L and this is the first time so far on this trip that the right side seat failed me as it is usually one of the best sides you can pick for most approaches but maybe not today.
Here we are, on final for RWY 24 and I honestly wish I had this aircraft on the first flight to Quebec City but I am grateful to have this aircraft on one of the longer flights of this trip rather than on the shortest well at least in terms of the flights I took domestically through Canada 🇨🇦
TOUCHDOWN! Welcome back to Toronto and I gotta give it to Air Canada this time around, disregarding my flight on Rouge from yesterday the previous flight on them was pretty basic and I initially anticipated it again but once I figured out that our aircraft has been swapped to the A220, I was in for a treat I received some great birthday gifts but NONE will compare to this aircraft swap provided by Air Canada. Yeah we still didn’t have a service onboard but the crew inviting me into cockpit was just very sweet of them and you’ll be seeing that right now.
Either way, I still would’ve asked to come to the cockpit mainly because I have a small rule I have where I visit the cockpits of aircraft I fly for the first time and today was my first A220 flight so I was glad to have a special aircraft fly me back to Toronto on a special day.
Welcome back to Toronto’s Pearson airport which we left the terminal as quick as possible easily done thanks to us not having checked bags, made our way back to the cars and started driving back towards Keswick to finally get some sleep so the next day we can be around the area before the following day actually paying a proper visit to Toronto. That will be all regarding this birthday flight from Montreal to Toronto on Air Canadas Airbus A220-300 surprisingly, stay tuned for New Years Eve as we fly back home to Miami 🏝️😎 on American Airlines Airbus A319 and as always between now and the next time, see you in the sky! 😉👋