Pacific Coastal Airlines
airline in Canada
Pacific Coastal Airlines is a Canadian regional airline that operates scheduled, charter and cargo services to destinations in British Columbia. Its head office is located in the South Terminal of Vancouver International Airport in Richmond, British Columbia. Its main base is Vancouver International Airport.
History
The original Pacific Coastal Airlines was established in 1956 as Cassidair Services, operating from its base at the airport in Cassidy, now Nanaimo Airport, south of Nanaimo. In early 1980, the airline was acquired by Jim Pattison Industries and absorbed into Airwest Airlines, also recently acquired by Pattison. At the time of the acquisition, Pacific Coastal was operating on the Nanaimo-Vancouver, Victoria–Nanaimo–Comox–Campbell River–Port Hardy, and Nanaimo-Qualicum Beach–Port Alberni routes. On November 1, 1980, Airwest and several other local airlines recently acquired by Pattison were merged into Air BC.
The current Pacific Coastal Airlines was established in 1987 by the merger of Powell Air and the Port Hardy division of Air BC. It acquired the shares and assets of Wilderness Seaplanes on April 1, 1998.
A new airline division, Wilderness Seaplanes, which started service on May 5, 2016, was established to take over the Pacific Coastal Airlines Seaplane Division and is based at Port Hardy and Bella Bella.
On November 24, 2017, WestJet and Pacific Coastal announced a capacity purchase agreement for Pacific Coastal to operate Saab 340 aircraft under the WestJet Link brand commencing in June 2018. These aircraft were based at the WestJet hub at Calgary International Airport and served destinations such as Lethbridge and Lloydminster with aircraft also being based at Vancouver International Airport with service to Cranbrook and Comox.
“Pacific Coastal Airlines” enters the record as airline in Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pacific, Coastal and Airlines can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1427310. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1980, 1987 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pacific Coastal Airlines” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.