Pacific Coastal Airlines’ new direct flight between Kamloops and Victoria is taking off today, October 17.

Kamloops Airport Managing Director, Ed Ratuski, told Radio NL this hour-long flight has been a long time coming for both business and leisure travellers between the Tournament Capital and the Provincial Capital.

“We’re quite excited about getting that service,” Ratuski said. “It is a route we’ve been looking for a number of years but just with COVID and pilot shortages, there just wasn’t the capacity in the system to offer it.”

“The demand has been there for quite some time for that route. It is basically as the airlines continue their recovery and are able to support additional routes, we continue to work with them to get those promising routes back on the board for us.”

Pacific Coastal will fly between Kamloops and Victoria six times a week – from Sunday to Friday – using a 19-seater Beechcraft 1900 aircraft.

The aircraft is scheduled to leave Victoria around 3:40 p.m., arriving in Kamloops around 4:40 p.m. It will then leave Kamloops at 5:05 p.m. and arrive back for Victoria at 6:05 p.m.

“It just takes that connection that passengers have to make in Vancouver if they’re going onto the Island away,” Ratuski added. “With winter travel on the Coquihalla and everything that goes along with that and ferry cancellations, we think its going to be an excellent operation for Pacific Coastal this winter.”

As it stands, these flights are set to run until April 26 of next year, though Ratuski is confident Pacific Coastal will expand service to Kamloops and operate flights around the year.

“I don’t know if anybody had done it in the past but there might have been one or two attempts years ago [to connect Kamloops and Victoria] but this is definitely a route that the numbers are showing that it should be quite successful for Pacific Coastal,” Ratuski said.

“They put in for their winter schedule this year and then we quite expect that the flight will do well and that it will continue on into a year-round service.”