Does Finnair Fly to Halifax?

When I was in the Halifax International Airport earlier in the month on my way to LIFT, I noticed a Finnair flight from Helsinki on the arrivals display. When I got back to Canada, I tried to find out more information about Finnair’s flights to and from Halifax, but a search of the Finnair website came up with nothing.

I cleared up the confusion this morning with a call to the Finnair office in Toronto: apparently these flight are non-scheduled “leisure flights” that are making a “technical stop” (presumably for re-fueling) in Halifax en route from Finland to the Caribbean.

Finnair doesn’t have the rights to pick up or leave off passengers in Halifax, so although the flights might show as “arriving” on the displays in the airport, you can’t actually fly on them from Halifax.

Which is a shame: if I could fly from Halifax to Helsinki, I probably would.

In the meantime, my friendly Finnair agent told me that they fly year-round from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to Finland in partnership with American Airlines and British Airways, and direct from Toronto during the summer three times a week.