Flight delayed

A direct flight from Thunder Bay to Minneapolis likely won’t be in place until the New Year, says the executive vice-president of Bearskin Airlines.

Cliff Friesen said there are still plenty of details to work out before the regional carrier can take over the route, abandoned earlier this year by Delta Airlines. First and foremost the company must strike an agreement with the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, find handlers to deal with luggage and passengers and secure approval from aviation authorities on both side of the border.

Friesen said Bearskin representatives met with Minneapolis airport officials last week to work out some of the details.

However, the delay in service resumption owes itself in part to the unavailability of passenger numbers from Delta, which Friesen said means they’re starting from scratch trying to put a fiscally efficient schedule together.

Delta, he said, considers passenger numbers to be proprietary, and won’t release them, forcing Bearskin to conduct its own surveys to determine a business plan for the new route. This is expected to be completed within a month or so.

"That will determine for us whether we have the ability to generate enough revenue to make a profit on that particular route," he said.

"We’re looking at a daily schedule. It could be as much as two times a day and we’ve also looked at times when the traffic is a lot heavier, which is in the wintertime, when there are a lot of people traveling to the hot spots, so that could be as many as three times a day."

Friesen said Bearskin, which he and brother Harvey recently sold to a Manitoba transportation company, has already made the decision to go with a smaller plane than the 60-seater Delta used on its money-losing route.

"We know there’s a market there. There was a market there 15 years ago when we were operating. We know that the market isn’t there for the aircraft that Delta was marketing," Friesen said.

Bearskin operated the Thunder Bay-Minneapolis route for much of the 1990s.