dailynewsnblog
The transatlantic market between North America and Europe has long been one of the most lucrative areas of the commercial aviation sector. However, you’d be wrong if you thought that this part of the airline industry consisted entirely of huge widebody jets flying between intercontinental mega hubs. While narrowbodies are becoming more common here, one route stands out as especially obscure.
The corridor starts at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG). This, in and of itself, is not surprising for a transatlantic route, given that the French capital has long served as the country’s main aerial gateway for North America. However, the destination is much more unusual: the French overseas collectivity of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. Located near Canada, this territory has its own transatlantic flights.
Air Saint-Pierre’s Rare Transatlantic Flight
According to current scheduling data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company, Air Saint-Pierre has penciled in a total of 12 round trips between Paris CDG and Saint-Pierre Pointe-Blanche Airport (FSP) this year. These seasonal services started in 2018 and operate once a week, with the outbound rotation departing from Paris every Monday from June 22 to September 7.
Numbered as Air Saint-Pierre flight PJ637, this service is scheduled to take six hours and 30 minutes, departing from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport at 4:00 PM and arriving in Saint-Pierre at 6:30 PM local time. The aircraft then remains on the ground overnight, before operating a rare daytime eastbound transatlantic flight every Tuesday. This service, PJ638, departs from Saint-Pierre at 10:30 AM.
Its arrival back into Paris is scheduled for 8:05 PM, just five hours and 35 minutes later. A quick look at Flightradar24 shows that the actual time spent in the air in this direction can be as little as four hours and 40 minutes, while the quickest westbound leg took five hours and 14 minutes.
Operated By ASL Airlines France
Readers who are familiar with the day-to-day operations of Air Saint-Pierre will know that it favors turboprops, with data from ch-aviation showing that the ATR 42 is its aircraft family of choice. As such, with these aircraft unable to make loaded transatlantic journeys, Air Saint-Pierre’s Paris flights are instead operated on its behalf by ASL Airlines France using a Boeing 737-700 registered as F-GZTP.
According to ch-aviation, this US-built narrowbody twinjet is 19.6 years old, having first flown back in December 2006. It was delivered to China Southern Airlines later that month, and spent a decade there under the registration B-5235. After a brief period of inactivity, the jet joined ASL Airlines in March 2017, at which point it was re-registered under its current designation, F-GZTP. It has 148 economy seats.
Interestingly, however, Cirium’s scheduling data show that Air Saint-Pierre actually sells only a maximum of 122 of these on each of its flights to and from Paris, giving it a maximum possible load factor of 82.43%. According to One Mile At A Time, the flights’ payloads are restricted because of the relatively short runway in Saint-Pierre, which measures just 1,800 meters (5,906 feet).
Air Saint-Pierre’s Usual Operations Are Much Closer To Home
Without Air Saint-Pierre’s ASL Airlines France-operated 737-700 flights that run nonstop across the North Atlantic Ocean, passengers looking to travel between Saint-Pierre and the French capital city would have to fly via a Canadian transit airport. Currently, Air Saint-Pierre serves three such facilities, with flights from Saint-Pierre to Halifax, Montreal, and St John’s in July 2026.
Halifax is the most popular of these, with four ATR-operated flights a week in each direction taking around 90 minutes. These operate on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Sandwiched between them are two weekly rotations to Montreal, which run on Thursdays and Saturdays and take three hours and 25 minutes, and one weekly rotation to St John’s, which takes 45 minutes every Sunday.
