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Comment by standeven | Hacker News Reader

From the article: "...Harbour Air is in the "sweet spot" in the industry as its flights are short, meaning battery technology as it stands today makes the project viable."

While batteries may not be viable for longer commercial flights, these short hops make sense.

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With the Canadian/US land border closed, but 5m (minute or meter) flights over the border being kosher, the sweet spot right now is temporarily massive.

Looking at their website, Harbour has actually cancelled their usual Vancouver/Seattle flights due to Covid - they don't seem to be running cross border at all right now.

Interesting.

But when? The snowbird business would have died off a month ago. It probably was a good business for them, and something that popped up in areas that didn’t already have short-haul flights. Maybe they still do them as charters for those that don’t want to sit with rando pax.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/snowbirds-canada-u-s-border...

But I’m sure many/most just flew down deeper into US and forwent their Canadian car (possibly buying a beater/long term rental for US).

Appears to have been at least initially cancelled back in March, initially until the end of April - https://www.vicnews.com/news/harbour-air-cancels-all-seattle.... I haven't seen any announcement of them resuming between now and then, but nothing that rules it out. I'm sure there are folks on HN who could tell us from public flight records.

Not to say there haven't been problematic purposes for charter flights to non-us destinations going on, either - https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-couple-charged-after-charter...

Better info on that one here:

https://www.yukon-news.com/news/former-ceo-of-great-canadian...

Unsure why any law gets passed with max $500 fines and 6 months jail if they’re not going to throw jail time at the most egregious cases.

The "5 meter" comment has me wondering -- what's the shortest flight that's legally considered a flight?

Is it the moment your gear is no longer touching the ground? The moment your wings leave ground-effect? (Is the ekranoplan technically a plane or a boat?) The moment you cross the property-line of the departing airport? (And how would that work for bush planes?)

Perhaps it is this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westray_to_Papa_Westray_flight

In reality, the 5meter thing wouldn’t work as they’d need to land at an international airport.

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