Calgary’s airport is having a record run. In 2025, YYC handled 19.4 million travellers and offered 108 non-stop destinations. That growth strengthens tourism, trade and Calgary’s status as a global gateway.

But two events this summer exposed the other side of Alberta’s aviation strategy. WestJet’s brief flight-attendant strike disrupted about 250,000 travellers and led the airline to cancel 922 of 2,365 scheduled flights between Aug. 1 and 5. Weeks earlier, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat lost their only scheduled passenger service.

These are not separate stories. They reveal a system that is efficient when everything works, but increasingly brittle when one part fails.

A hub-and-spoke network works by funnelling passengers from many cities through one airport. This economy of density lets airlines fill aircraft and serve destinations that individual cities could not support on their own. It is one reason Calgary has gained so many routes.

The trade-off is concentration. Aircraft, crews and passengers are tightly connected through scheduled waves. When a labour dispute, IT outage, severe storm or fleet problem removes capacity, disruption does not stay local. It moves through the network as aircraft and crews end up in the wrong cities and passengers miss later connections.

Airline managers track load factor and aircraft utilization because empty seats and idle airplanes damage route economics. Resilience, however, depends on options that look inefficient on a normal-day spreadsheet: schedule slack, recovery capacity, interline agreements and alternative carriers. The question is which forms of redundancy are worth paying for.

Concentration is not automatically bad. Cirium estimated that WestJet carries 62 per cent of passengers at its Calgary base. That scale helps make YYC attractive as a hub. But the same scale changes Calgary’s risk profile. More destinations do not necessarily mean more alternatives when a dominant operator is unavailable.

The regional picture is even sharper. Airlines cannot be expected to operate structurally unviable routes indefinitely. Yet when Lethbridge and Medicine Hat lose scheduled service, costs do not disappear. They shift to residents, employers and public services through longer drives, lost time, and weaker access to the national network.

Alberta therefore needs a better definition of aviation success. Passenger totals and destination counts matter, but they are incomplete.

The province, airports and carriers should publish an Alberta Air Access and Resilience Scorecard with four measures. The scorecard must be route-level. It should distinguish scheduled seats from usable alternatives: An inconvenient departure, or a connection without through-ticketing and baggage protection, may offer little help to a stranded passenger.

First, choice: How many important routes have a viable second carrier? The Competition Bureau found that an additional competitor on a route reduces average fares by about nine per cent.

Second, recovery: After a major disruption, what share of passengers can be rerouted within six, 12 and 24 hours?

Third, regional access: How many Albertans live within a reasonable drive of frequent scheduled service?

Fourth, recovery time: How quickly do aircraft, crews and schedules return to normal after labour, weather, cyber or technical shocks?

Better measurement should lead to targeted policy, not a blank cheque. Alberta can test time-limited route-development agreements, competitive minimum-revenue guarantees with sunset clauses, and interline arrangements that allow regional passengers to use one ticket and transfer bags at Calgary. Any support should require transparent targets for reliability, frequency and local demand growth.

Calgary should celebrate YYC’s growth, and WestJet deserves credit for helping create a global hub. But a mature aviation strategy asks a harder question: How well does the network serve Albertans and recover on its worst day?

The strike is over. The stress test should not be forgotten.

Sajad S. Afshari is an assistant professor of aviation in the Department of International Business, Supply Chain Management and Aviation at Mount Royal University. The analysis and recommendations are the author’s own and do not represent an official MRU position.