CALGARY – Air Transat has reached a tentative deal with its pilot union, narrowly avoiding a strike on the cusp of the busy holiday travel period, meaning that Francois Tremblay, 32, will indeed have to use his previously-booked flight to travel home to visit family in Saguenay, QC.
The news, which has come as a relief to many Air Transat customers, is currently sinking in for Tremblay, a local IT engineer.
“Oh good, I won’t have to spend the holidays alone ordering takeout and playing PS5 in my pajamas,” said Tremblay, still looking at his phone. “Instead I can fly halfway across the country, then be driven 2 and a half hours to my parents house, during which we will exhaust all possible conversation that could be made over the 7 days until I fly back to Calgary.”
Neither the company nor the union representing around 750 Air Transat pilots have released details of the tentative agreement, leading Tremblay to hunt through numerous articles and Reddit threads hoping that the deal may still fall apart so that he does not have to spend Christmas Day sitting next to his most conspiratorial uncle who posts daily on Facebook that Jeffrey Epstein faked his death and changed his name to Mark Carney.
“I also can’t wait to have the exact same conversation with 13 different aunts about how I just ‘need to save more to afford a $20,000 down payment on a house’,” Tremblay added, while staring off into the middle distance.
With Air Transat ramping up to cover 18 flights this week, which had been cancelled as a precaution, Tremblay was currently waiting on hold to see if he could help by offering to give up his seat from Calgary to Quebec City on December 23rd.
At press time, Tremblay’s parents were disappointedly closing the browser window on a pair of Air Canada round trip tickets to Cancun that they were going to buy if their adult son was not flying home for the holidays.
