How We Decide Where Wy'East Flies Next
Most new route ideas start with someone saying, "this aircraft could reach that."
And sometimes that is exactly the point. For example: One of the things the A220 does particularly well is open long, lean routes that might be too small for a larger narrowbody. So we recently went looking for a route like that from Portland and ended up asking the same question about two destinations: Nassau and San Juan.
Could the A220-300 connect PDX with the Caribbean, and would it actually make sense?
A quick note before we get into it. Wy'East does not simulate airline economics in our day-to-day operations. We are not managing ticket prices, fuel bills or aircraft maintenance costs with each flight and route. But we do want the network underneath those operations to be financially realistic and plausible. A route should look like something an airline could reasonably operate, not simply something an aircraft can technically fly.
Our pilots also have plenty of freedom outside that core network. Charter flights can be flown between any airports with any appropriate aircraft. A route missing from the schedule does not mean you cannot fly it, it just means we were not convinced it belonged in the regular network.
The numbers below are also intentionally rough. We use public airport data, schedules, published fares and operating-cost estimates, with tools including ChatGPT and Claude helping us gather and work through some of that information.
Can the airplane do it?
Nassau is about 2,500 nm from PDX and San Juan is a little over 3,200 nm. Airbus lists the A220-300 at about 3,400 nm of range.
We use planerange.com as our first pass to look at if an aircraft can make a trip, as it includes typical load factors along with eastbound and westbound winds.
Nassau is a comfortable range year-round, but San Juan is different. Once winter westbound winds, reserves, payload and real-world operating conditions enter the equation, there is not much margin left. Practically, it is ruled out as a destination with the A220-300 (we still will do the math though to see what it would take)
We could also solve the range problem by using our A321neo. But putting a larger, more capable aircraft on the route does nothing to solve the bigger question: are there enough passengers willing to pay enough money to support it?
Would anyone fly it?
Portland itself is not a problem. PDX handled 18.56 million passengers in 2025, up 6.0% from the year before.
It also already supports plenty of leisure flying. Hawaii, Mexico, Southern California and Florida all fit naturally into the Portland market.
The Bahamas welcomed a record 12.5 million visitors in 2025. That sounds promising until you look more closely at how people get there. A huge share of Bahamian tourism comes by cruise ship rather than air, and there is no established nonstop market between Portland and the Caribbean.
San Juan creates an interesting case for the opposite reason. Getting there from the Pacific Northwest usually means a connection and a long travel day. A nonstop would offer a substantial time advantage. My own family has dealt with this trying to get to San Juan for cruises.
But the lack of existing service also gives us pause. An unserved market can represent an opportunity, but it can also mean other airlines have looked at the same passengers and found better places to put their airplanes. In Nassau's case, we actually have a useful real-world test.
Someone already tried it
Alaska Airlines launched nonstop Seattle to Nassau service in December 2023 at three flights per week. Introductory fares started at $199 one way. Seattle is a much larger Alaska hub than Portland and gives the route access to a substantial local market plus connecting traffic throughout the Pacific Northwest.
That does not prove a Portland flight could never work. Airlines cancel routes for plenty of reasons, and demand can change over time. But when a larger nearby hub has already tested essentially the same long, thin West Coast-to-Bahamas idea and ultimately walked away from it, we have to treat that as meaningful evidence.
For Wy'East, Nassau would need a strong reason to believe Portland could succeed where Seattle did not.
Does the money work?
For this exercise, we assumed roughly $6,000 to $7,000 per block hour in fully allocated operating costs. That gives us approximately $37,000 per leg to Nassau and $47,000 to San Juan (assuming we can even fly it with the winds).
Our A220-300 seats 130 passengers:
88 Main Cabin
30 Premium
12 First
For the model, we assumed a Premium seat produces 1.6 times the revenue of a Main Cabin seat and First produces 2.4 times.That gives us the following approximate Main Cabin fare required each way to cover the flight:
Scenario | Nassau | San Juan |
Weak Load Factor: 85% Main / 50% Premium / 40% First | ~$335 | ~$426 |
Base Load Factor: 85% Main / 70% Premium / 60% First | ~$294 | ~$374 |
Strong Load Factor: 92% Main / 85% Premium / 75% First | ~$258 | ~$328 |
The base case fills about 79% of the airplane.
For Nassau, we are asking Portland passengers to consistently support roughly $600 round-trip Main Cabin pricing before accounting for all the other things that can go wrong with a seasonal leisure route... not a great sell.
San Juan is even harder. The base case needs roughly $748 round trip in Main Cabin just to support our simplified cost assumptions.
Neither number is automatically impossible. The problem is combining those fares with a market that has little evidence of sustained nonstop demand. This is what we mean when we say a route does not pencil out. The aircraft can do the mission. The destination is attractive. The route would be fun to fly. But too many assumptions have to go right at the same time. Also, in San Juan's case, even those economics do not solve the fact that we would need a different aircraft to operate it reliably.
Does it fit the network?
There is another cost that does not show up cleanly in the table: the airplane itself.
Wy'East does simulate individual aircraft. When a pilot is using a particular aircraft, that aircraft is unavailable for someone else to fly. A six or seven hour flight limits how many other pilots can use that aircraft, particularly during busy periods like evenings and weekends.
There is a real-world parallel, too. If we think about the economics, that same A220 cannot spend those hours operating several shorter routes where demand is easier to predict and where the aircraft can generate revenue multiple times during the day.
Seasonality makes that even more important. If Nassau works primarily as a winter route, the aircraft still needs somewhere productive to go for the rest of the year.
So aircraft utilization matters to Wy'East in two ways: one because we want the underlying network to make financial sense, and two because it directly affects how available our fleet is to our pilots.
So, do we add them?
No.
Nassau is technically easy for the A220-300, but the market looks too thin to justify tying up an aircraft for such a long flight. A larger hub, Seattle, has already tested the basic idea without establishing durable service.
San Juan was more intriguing. The existing travel options are poor enough that a nonstop would offer a real product advantage. But the route fails for two reaons. The A220-300 does not have enough practical margin for us to schedule it reliably, and moving up to the A321neo would mean putting even more capacity into a market with little evidence of sustained nonstop demand.
At the end of the day, not every network-planning exercise we do needs to end with a new route.
Wy'East already serves established leisure markets like Cancun from Portland with the A320 and 737-800, where there is enough demand to support larger aircraft. The A220's role is not to replace those airplanes or force a new destination onto the map simply because it has the range to get there.
What makes the A220 interesting is its ability to make long and lean routes possible: markets that may be too small for a larger narrowbody but still have enough demand and revenue to justify nonstop service. Nassau and San Juan looked like exactly the kind of opportunities worth investigating.
Nassau is comfortably within the A220-300's capabilities, but we could not find enough evidence that Portland could support the route. San Juan offers a compelling nonstop product, but combines an unproven market with a mission near the edge of the A220-300's practical range.
That does not mean the A220 needs another route added in their place. Sometimes the realistic network decision is to leave the airplane flying the routes that already make sense and wait for a better opportunity.
None of this stops you from taking an A220-300 to Nassau or San Juan yourself. Grab the airplane, file a charter, and head for the Caribbean.
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