Lynx Air

[Downunder]

Clearly you can be the wrong gender if you work at Lynx, and what’s with the Australian's

 https://australianaviation.com.au/2022/06/exclusive-management-didnt-understand-women-says-ex-tiger-ceo/

[Guest2]

Lynx Air Announces Major Expansion to United States

28 September 2022Canadian Aviation News

To celebrate, Lynx is launching a contest to win free flight and accommodation packages to its new sun destinations

CALGARY, AB, Sept. 28, 2022 /CNW/ – Lynx Air (Lynx), Canada’s new ultra-affordable airline, today announced its expansion into the United States, with the addition of Orlando, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas to its network.

Orlando will be Lynx’s first US destination, with flights taking off from Toronto starting on January 27, 2023.  Lynx’s US network will continue to expand over the following weeks, with the launch of services out of the Calgary gateway to Phoenix on February 7, 2023, Los Angeles on February 16, 2023, and Las Vegas on February 24, 2023. At that point, Lynx will be operating 5,292 seats per week to and from the United States from its Toronto and Calgary hubs.

Tickets go on sale today, and the fares are truly ultra-affordable, starting from $109* one way, including taxes. To celebrate, Lynx will be offering four lucky Canadians a chance to win a free flight and accommodation package to one of Lynx’s new sun destinations. The airline has also launched a limited-time seat sale, offering up to 50 per cent off all base fares to and from the United States, with the promo code LYNXUSA.  The sale will run from 11:00 AM MDT on September 28, 2022, and end at 12:00 PM MDT on October 6, 2022. For complete contest details, and to book an ultra-affordable fare, please visit FlyLynx.com.

“With winter approaching, we know Canadians love to travel south in search of warmer weather. We are thrilled to be offering an ultra-affordable option to four of the most popular sun destinations in the United States,” said Merren McArthur, CEO of Lynx.  “By choosing Lynx, Canadians can save on the journey and spend more at their sun-soaked getaway. We are so excited about our US expansion that we have launched a competition today to win a free flight and accommodation package to one of our new sun destinations: Orlando, Phoenix, Los Angeles or Las Vegas.”

“This is another great option for Toronto Pearson passengers to access popular winter destinations,” says Janik Reigate, Director, Strategic Customer Relationships for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority. “As the U.S. is a top country for travel through Pearson, these routes support travel to an important and attractive market for Canadians.”

“Lynx’s expansion to the U.S. is a strong indication of their confidence in YYC and that the future of air travel is bright. Their new routes provide Calgarians even more choice to visit desirable destinations south of the border,” said Rob Palmer, Vice President, Commercial, Strategy & Chief Financial Officer. “We look forward to continuing to partner with Lynx Air on creating memorable experiences for our guests.”

Lynx’s US schedule:

Round Trip Market	Service Starts	Weekly Frequencies
Toronto, ON to Orlando, FL	January 23, 2023	4x
Calgary, AB to Phoenix, AZ	February 7, 2023	3x
Calgary, AB to Los Angeles, CA	February 16, 2023	3x
Calgary, AB to Las Vegas, NV	February 24, 2023	4x

Please note that dates are subject to change. Visit the website for full schedule details.

* Available for a limited time; fares are accurate at the time of release and include taxes and fees; fares vary by destination and date.

[Downunder]

I am hearing there is a new COO coming from Jet Blue. I guess someone did not fall in line

[Rich Pulman]

Looks like another one bites the dust. This just in…

[boestar]

Aviation in Canada. Those who can do it better....Can't

 

[Malcolm]

More on the story, a follow up to Rich's post

Lynx Air to cease operations Monday, files for creditor protection

By Sean Previl  Global News

Posted February 22, 2024 6:28 pm

 Updated February 23, 2024 7:57 am

 3 min read

Lynx Air says its final flights will take place on Sunday as the company files for creditor protection, less than two years after the low-cost airline took to the skies.

The Calgary-based company announced in a news release on Thursday it has sought and obtained an initial order of protection from creditors from the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta, under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act.

As of 12:01 a.m. MT on Monday, Feb. 26, Lynx Air says its operations will cease, with scheduled flights continuing to operate until that time.

The company says it has faced “significant headwinds” in the past year, including rising operating costs, high fuel prices, exchange rates, increasing airport charges and a difficult economic and regulatory environment.age redirected to different province

In the release, the company touts that it has grown its fleet and number of destinations while doubling its passenger volume in the past two years. Despite that growth, and efforts to explore a sale or merger, Lynx Air said the challenges facing the company’s business “have become too significant to overcome.”

“This is a difficult day for everyone at Lynx Air and we recognize it’s an exceptionally difficult day for our loyal customers,” a spokesperson for Lynx said in a statement to Global News.

 

The company added that efforts are being made to assist passengers affected by the move, with those who have existing bookings advised to contact their credit card company to secure refunds for pre-booked travel.

The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) has published guidance for Lynx Air passengers, including contact information for government agencies in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia that can help secure refunds from travel agencies registered in those provinces.

The CTA said stranded passengers or those with tickets for future travel with Lynx should contact their travel agents or providers for alternate travel arrangements, but said those passengers may have to make those arrangements on their own.

• However, Transport Minister Pablo Rodriguez said in a statement he expects Lynx Air to get stranded passengers back home as soon as possible, and to provide refunds if fares cannot be honoured.

[Falken]

Good to see Pablo is right on top of this!

[Airband]

Wonder if it might be time for financial stress tests similar to those applied to banks, pension funds, and insurance companies to be required for airlines to ensure minimum funds are maintained in a segregated account
to cover costs of returning stranded passengers. Better yet, we could wait for some bright spark at CTA to come up with a 'Stranded Passenger Indemnity Fee' add-on to an already lengthy list of fees and taxes.

[Malcolm]

On 2/23/2024 at 7:19 PM, Airband said:

Wonder if it might be time for financial stress tests similar to those applied to banks, pension funds, and insurance companies to be required for airlines to ensure minimum funds are maintained in a segregated account
to cover costs of returning stranded passengers. Better yet, we could wait for some bright spark at CTA to come up with a 'Stranded Passenger Indemnity Fee' add-on to an already lengthy list of fees and taxes.

In the mean time:

Air Canada Responds to Suspension of Operations at Lynx Air Français

---

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Air Canada 

Feb 23, 2024, 16:25 ET

---

MONTREAL, Feb. 23, 2024 /CNW/ - Air Canada said today it will cap fares and add more than 6,000 seats in select markets operated by Lynx Air in response to the airline's announcement that it is suspending operations beginning February 26, 2024. The measures are to provide Lynx Air customers affected by the carrier's shutdown affordable options in the Economy cabin on Air Canada flights for travel within Canada, to the US and to Cancun in Mexico so they can return home or make alternative travel arrangements for planned winter trips.

 

Air Canada Logo (CNW Group/Air Canada)

 

These fares will be available for purchase before February 26 for travel through April 2, to cover the March Spring break periods across Canada and the Easter holiday period. All flights will be available for purchase at aircanada.com or through travel agents. Air Canada will not be able to honour Lynx Air tickets and Lynx Air customers are advised to consult the Canadian Transportation Agency website.

 

Air Canada is also planning to add incremental capacity of more than 6,000 seats on Lynx routes from Toronto and Montreal to Cancun, Fort Myers, Orlando, Tampa. Phoenix and Las Vegas between February 25 and March 19. However, with the busy winter travel holiday period underway, flights are already relatively full and the carrier's ability to increase capacity further is limited.

[Airband]

Lynx Air blames everyone but itself for its demise

Sun Feb 25, 2024 - The Globe and Mail
by Monette Pasher - President of Canadian Airports Council

It was heartbreaking to watch passengers deal with the sudden end of Lynx Air in recent days. Unfortunately, Lynx’s announcement this week about its imminent demise is not the first time an airline has gone under and it’s not likely to be the last.

There’s a wide genre of travel articles about what to do when your budget airline goes bust. Airlines are a low-margin industry, and disrupter companies tend to enter the market by trying to stimulate leisure travel. They offer amazingly low base fares, augmented by high hidden fees. If things break right, they buy enough market share and become established players. If they don’t, they exhaust their startup capital and flame out. For Lynx, that took two years.

The airline announced its departure with a news release congratulating itself for doubling its launch-day passenger volume and blaming a salad of economic “headwinds” beyond its control, including “rising operating costs, high fuel prices, exchange rates, increasing airport charges and difficult economic and regulatory environment.”

Not cool, for several reasons.

First, passengers need to come before blame. Despite announcing that it would continue flights through the weekend and make “every effort” to assist travellers, passengers have clearly come last in recent days. Rather than issuing refunds, Lynx left travellers to sort out refunds with their credit-card companies.

Second, nearly everyone in aviation could clearly see that charging passengers as little as a $39 base fare to travel by jet plane in 2024 is a fundamentally unsustainable way to run a business. It’s the equivalent of selling store-bought lemonade for five cents a glass. It doesn’t have to be $5 a glass, but it can’t be all but free.

Third, every carrier in Canada faces the same economic conditions, and many are operating profitably at a time of heightened travel demand. Labour and fuel cost what they cost. Exchange rates fluctuate. The regulatory environment is known. Lynx has been operating without a chief executive for nearly six months, but these are the macro conditions any airline CEO and leadership team should be capable of navigating on a daily basis.

And lastly, “increased airport charges” are such a small percentage in the financial health of any airline – especially an airline that isn’t financially sustainable to begin with. The most expensive airport charges in Canada are less than what Lynx charged passengers for a carry-on bag or a stroller. (Luggage fees are a cash cow for the global airline industry, driving US$33-billion in revenue last year.)

Canada’s airports occasionally catch flak for their fees, but it’s worth remembering that we operate non-profits with an excellent track record for keeping fees as low as possible while self-financing the infrastructure improvements and critical maintenance demanded by passengers and regulators.

Also, these critics often lump all airport fees together, when they should fairly be considered separately.

Aeronautical fees are charged to airlines to recoup service costs. Canadian aeronautical fees are highly competitive globally, having not kept up with inflation in recent years – in many cases, they are lower than what’s charged in other countries.

Airport improvement fees are charged to passengers for infrastructure and get attached to airline tickets. Taken in isolation, they are less competitive, especially when compared to U.S. airports. But it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison – Canadian taxpayers and the federal government do not contribute to infrastructure costs here, unlike U.S. airports, which are heavily subsidized by Washington. If fully calculated with federal taxes and fees, Americans pay more for their airports than Canadians do. Lower Canadian airport improvement fees would mean correspondingly higher Canadian taxes – there’s no escaping the cost of infrastructure, just how it gets paid.

Even if you take these two charges together – competitive aeronautical fees and improvement fees that substitute for tax hikes – they account for just 12 per cent of the average Canadian airfare, according to 2023 research by the Canadian Airports Council. A full 88 per cent of the ticket price is made up of the base fare, security charges, airline surcharges and ancillary fees, and taxes levied by the countries of departure and arrival.

No doubt that proportion was less than 88 per cent for Lynx, which wasn’t charging enough to stick around. But let’s not pretend that budget airlines are naive about the path to success. The startup playbook sometimes works and it sometimes doesn’t.

It’s true that Canada could do more to encourage disrupters in the airline sector. And this week’s flameout is terrible for jilted passengers. But responsibility for Lynx’s demise starts and ends with its business plan – not airport fees, or the same conditions all airlines face.

[Specs]

9 hours ago, Airband said:

And lastly, “increased airport charges” are such a small percentage in the financial health of any airline 

I stopped reading at that point.  

[J.O.]

What did he say that's untrue? If you had kept reading, you would have read that US airports are funded by Washington, instead of by airline passengers. You'd also have found a suggestion that our airports are in fact less expensive to run than in the US. If what he says is true then that's the first time I've read such a claim. I'm not saying it's true, but it bears further scrutiny. Of course, the problem for our industry is that AIFs make individual tickets more expensive because they're "user pay", whereas airports funded from general tax revenue are paid for by every taxpayer - whether they use airports, or not. Yes, it would look better for the industry if AIFs went away and instead, airports were funded through general tax revenues. That would mean treating airports like other key infrastructure, instead of treating them like a luxury as the user pay system suggests. The question would then be, which political party is going to promise to raise taxes to fund our airports? I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Edited February 26 by J.O.

[Specs]

6 hours ago, J.O. said:

What did he say that's untrue?

The Airport and Nav fees (which I guess I included in my sentiments) that the airline pay seem to vary between 5 and 10% of total operating expenses.   That's not a small percentage in the financial health of industry where a lofty 7% ROI is uncommon.     

Edited February 26 by Specs

[Malcolm]

Reminds me of when Wardair was bailed out,  what if that did not happen?

Ducking now:

Lynx Air hoped purchase by rival Flair would help pay off debt: court docs

By Christopher Reynolds  The Canadian Press

Posted February 27, 2024 3:39 pm

 Updated February 27, 2024 5:36 pm

Before its shutdown this week, Lynx Air hoped to pay off some of its debt to a top investor through a purchase by rival discount carrier Flair Airlines.

According to documents filed with the Alberta Court of King’s Bench, proceeds from a tentative deal with Flair would have gone toward Lynx’s $124.3-million debt to Indigo Partners, the U.S. private equity firm run by Bill Franke that owns one-quarter of Lynx.

The 1,275-page filing refers to its fellow budget airline dozens of times, including to a planned “Flair transaction” and a non-binding agreement signed on Jan. 11.

Flair confirmed Tuesday it had been in talks with Lynx about “potential business opportunities.”

“As part of our standard business practice, we continuously evaluate market opportunities,” CEO Stephen Jones said in an emailed statement.

“Flair’s interest in the potential acquisition aligns with our commitment to enhancing services for Canadians through the ULCC (ultra-low-cost carrier) model, focusing on improved connectivity and affordability.”

Lynx did respond to requests for comment.

When it filed for creditor protection on Thursday, Lynx also owed $25.6 million in unpaid taxes to the federal government and $47.8 million to various trade creditors, according to court documents.

Lynx owes a further $4.1 million to the Toronto and Montreal airports and $4.5 million to Delta Air Lines for aircraft maintenance and warehousing.

In an affidavit from its interim chief financial officer, Lynx said its inability to pay up meant that Delta would stop servicing its planes, leaving them stranded, and that Toronto’s Pearson airport would be able to seize its aircraft, effectively shutting down the carrier in a “chaotic and haphazard” fashion.

“Lynx obviously went to Flair as an 11th-hour Hail Mary,” said Robert Kokonis, president of consulting firm AirTrav Inc.

The filings state the Calgary-based company has $600 million in liabilities and $429 million in assets — the vast majority of them leases for nine Boeing 737 Max 8 jets.

Judge John Gill granted Lynx protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act last week, which allows firms to restructure their financial affairs and pay off lenders, typically for pennies on the dollar.

“The corporate entity that we know today as Lynx will not exist coming out of CCAA, based on what they’ve publicly stated,” said Duncan Dee, Air Canada’s former chief commercial officer.

“What it appears they’re doing is liquidating their assets.” carrier

The 21-month global grounding of the Max 8 along with COVID-19 travel restrictions and jet fuel price hikes delayed Lynx’s inaugural flight by more than two years to April 2022 and hampered ticket sales to the point it could no longer pay its creditors, the ultra-low-cost carrier said in a brief to the court.

“Unlike legacy airlines or a low-cost-carrier who can recoup lost revenue by increasing base fairs, a ULCC cannot deviate from the established base fare without abandoning the ULCC model altogether,” the filing states.

Dee questioned whether Flair had the capacity to purchase Lynx given its own financial troubles or, if it did, the desire to follow through due to Lynx’s cash-flow woes.

COMPANY NEWS; Owner of Canadian Air Will Acquire Wardair

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By John F. Burns, Special To the New York Times

• Jan. 20, 1989

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In a move that will reduce competition in domestic air travel in Canada to only two significant carriers, the PWA Corporation announced today that it planned to acquire all outstanding shares in Wardair Inc. of Toronto.

The offer of $17.25 a share ($14.40 in United States currency) has been valued at $248 million ($207 million) and was accepted by Wardair's founder and controlling shareholder, Max Ward, a former bush pilot. Wardair's class A shares soared $7.25, ($6.05) today, to $15.875, ($13.25) on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

The deal, announced by PWA, owner of Canadian Airlines International, will end a campaign by Wardair, using cut-rate fares, to challenge Canadian Airlines and the state-controlled carrier, Air Canada.

In addition, the deal is expected to hasten moves by the Canadian Government to sell its 55 percent stake in Air Canada. Some industry analysts expect a new share offering to come later this year.

 

 

Established in 1953, Wardair pioneered the air transport of heavy equipment in Canada's Far North. In the 1960's and 1970's the airline grew rapidly as a charter operator to Europe. But it ran into financial difficulties in the last two years as Mr. Ward fought to turn the airline into a scheduled carrier.

 

At a news conference in Toronto, Mr. Ward said that recent losses had forced the sale. ''We had cash-flow problems that were going to catch up with us,'' he said.

The purchase continued the policy of aggressive expansion that PWA began in 1987 with the purchase of Canadian Pacific Airlines. A merger with Pacific Western Airlines Ltd., a regional carrier in western Canada, produced a new carrier, Canadian Airlines International. With the acquisition of Wardair's 21 planes, Canadian Airlines will have a total of 99 jet aircraft, compared with 109 for Air Canada.

PWA said Wardair would continue to operate as a separate entity, with Mr. Ward as chairman, a provision industry analysts said should be helpful in winning regulatory approval for the purchase.

But Mr. Ward said PWA would trim a third of Wardair's 4,500 jobs. He also forecast a rise in air fares across Canada and from Canada to points in the United States and elsewhere, as PWA moves to end Wardair's policy of fare cutting.