Air Canada Celebrates 60 Years of Service to Barbados

Air Canada is celebrating 60 years of air service between Canada and the island nation of Barbados. To celebrate the occasion the airline is offering a special web fare for flights to and from Barbados, offering $60 off each way on Tango Plus, Latitude and Executive fares for Barbados.

The sale runs until Dec. 12 for travel between Dec. 2, 2009 and March 31, 2010. It was 60 years ago that Air Canada, then known as Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA), inaugurated weekly passenger services between Canada and Barbados when its 44-passenger propeller aircraft, the Canadair DC-4M “North Star,” landed on the coral surfaced runway in the early morning of Dec. 3, 1949.

Flight time out of Toronto on that inaugural flight was 15 hours with stops in the Bahamas and Jamaica. Today, the direct flight takes little more than five hours and this winter Air Canada will offer daily nonstop Toronto-Barbados service operating a 211-seat Boeing 767-300. There will be supplemental service on weekends with an additional flight from Toronto and Montreal using a 120-passenger Airbus A319 on Saturday and Sunday.