Is WestJet a Tier 1 airline?Long time investors will remember Bill Tempany's goal to install AFIRS on a Tier 1 airline. So, with the WestJet installations to date, has this been realised? As you will see there is no simple answer.
First of all, there does not seem to be a definitive definition of Tier 1, at least I have not found one. The most common one I have seen is carrying 25 million passengers per year. WestJet achieved this in 2018 with 25.5 and again in 2019 with 26 million. Of course, they have had significantly less than 25 million per year since and it may be a year or two before they get back to this threshold.
The next question is, what does it mean to say Flyht has “captured” a Tier 1. If there is no minimum number of installations required then Flyht has already achieved this but, in my opinion, it is not much of an achievement to boast about. So, how about requiring that all planes in the fleet have AFIRS on board. In this case, as long as we accept that WestJet is Tier 1, then we are there.
Bill mentioned in during the Q3 conference call that they expected to install AFIRS on the balance of their fleet (106 planes) by the end of the year and it appears they have achieved this. The 105th and106th planes were delivered in August and were operational soon after. It is clear that they had AFIRS installed on all 106 in 2022 since the next delivery, on December 6, was out for a test flight on January 5. A friend (also a Flyht investor) found this on planespotters.com, and we have confirmation that AFIRS had been installed. As of today, there have been more deliveries, bringing their total fleet to 111 planes.
The original WestJet order which appeared in January 2020 mentioned that the total number of planes would be more than 160. Now, three years later, WestJet has ninety-five orders which, when delivered, will make the fleet size 206. I read somewhere, but cannot find it, that another definition of Tier 1 was a fleet size of 200+ planes.
Whether or not WestJet can be called Tier 1 is somewhat moot. The fact that Flyht has installed AFIRS on the fleet of a large airline is a major achievement. It may have an impact on other large carriers waiting in the wings.
Piper