Harbour Air
airline

Harbour Air is a floatplane airline with scheduled, tour, and charter services based in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. Predominantly operating seaplanes the airline specializes in routes between Vancouver, Nanaimo, Victoria, Sechelt, Comox, Whistler and the Gulf Islands, primarily with de Havilland Canada floatplanes. Harbour Air operates de Havilland Beavers, Otters and Twin Otters.
History
The airline was established and started operations in 1982 as Windoak Air Service to provide seaplane charter services for the forestry industry in British Columbia. In 1993, Harbour Air purchased Trans-Provincial Airlines, added charter flights to resorts, and increased scheduled services. Today, Harbour Air refers to itself as the world's largest all-seaplane airline and became North America's first carbon neutral airline. A small subsidiary, Harbour Air Malta, was set up in June 2007, and a DHC-3 Turbo Otter floatplane is permanently based in Valletta, Malta for scheduled flights to Gozo and sightseeing trips around the islands. Harbour Air Magazine is the official in-flight magazine of Harbour Air.
In 2007, Harbour Air became the first airline in North America to achieve complete carbon neutrality in both flight services and corporate operations. Teamed up with Vancouver-based Offsetters, the airline started to include a carbon offset on each ticket used to mitigate the environmental impact of the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG's) associated with the flight.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q265578. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1993 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harbour Air” 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.