Swoop

Pink tail, huge titles, Boeing 737: between 2018 and 2023 Swoop was one of the most eye-catching splashes of color on Canadian aprons. Behind the cheeky look was a serious attempt by WestJet to claim the ultra-low-cost market in Canada with a budget brand of its own. After a good five years the experiment was over – but the aircraft keep flying. This page shows you what Swoop was, why the brand disappeared and how to classify the ex-Swoop jets today.

Swoop at a glance

Swoop was a Canadian ultra-low-cost airline and a wholly owned subsidiary of WestJet. The company was based in Calgary, where the parent is also at home. The new brand was announced on September 27, 2017, ticket sales started on February 1, 2018, and on June 20, 2018 the first flight took off: from Hamilton in Ontario to Abbotsford in British Columbia, with a Boeing 737-800.

The idea was clear: passengers who mainly look at price should not drift off to other budget carriers. For that, Swoop offered a bare-bones base fare – baggage, seat selection and other extras cost extra. The cabin was all economy, and there were no connecting itineraries. Every flight was a nonstop from A to B.

October 28, 2023 was the last day of flying. Since then Swoop no longer exists as an airline of its own; aircraft, routes and employees went back to WestJet.

Codes and callsign

• IATA code WO: appeared in Swoop flight numbers, for example on the last departure from Toronto, WO638 to Cancún.
• ICAO code WSW: appeared in the air traffic control flight plan and on flight trackers.
• Callsign SWOOP: how the crews identified themselves on the radio.

If you browse old tracker recordings, schedules or photo databases, these codes are the quickest route to Swoop flights. Since the end of October 2023 the same aircraft run under the WestJet codes WS or WJA. Why airlines have two different codes is explained in the guide to IATA and ICAO codes.

Why WestJet created a budget subsidiary

WestJet itself had started in 1996 as a low-cost airline, but over the years it had developed into a network airline with a hub in Calgary, a premium offering and long-haul. That left room for new budget competition – exactly the gap Swoop was meant to fill before others did.

You know the pattern from Europe and the US: established airlines create a cheaper brand with its own cost structure to hold on to price-sensitive customers. The core elements of the model – a uniform fleet, dense seating, short turnaround times, ancillary revenue – are described in the article How budget airlines work. The model for the point-to-point principle with an all-737 fleet has been Southwest Airlines in North America for decades, and in Europe it is Ryanair.

Originally Swoop was supposed to take off as early as the end of 2017. The launch slipped to June 2018 because WestJet switched to a cheaper booking system for the new brand.

Secondary airports instead of a hub

Instead of the big and expensive airports, Swoop deliberately relied on smaller airfields at first. Hamilton in Ontario became the first base and with it Swoop’s gateway to the Greater Toronto Area. In the west, Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley played a similar role for the Vancouver area. Added to these were Edmonton and Winnipeg, from where Swoop flew starting June 25, 2018.

The launch network was manageable: Hamilton–Abbotsford, Hamilton–Halifax, Hamilton–Edmonton and Hamilton–Winnipeg, supplemented in summer 2018 by connections like Edmonton–Abbotsford and Winnipeg–Abbotsford. In October 2020 Swoop then moved its base in the east from Hamilton to the major airport Toronto Pearson.

The route network: Canada, the US and the sun

After the domestic launch, Swoop grew quickly southward. At the end of October 2018, after some delay due to pending US approvals, flights to the US began. Typical destinations were Las Vegas, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and Phoenix-Mesa, with San Diego added later as a summer destination. In winter 2018/19 Mexico and the Caribbean followed with Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán and Montego Bay, and from fall 2019 Los Cabos as well.

Domestically the network also became denser: London (Ontario), Kelowna, Victoria and Kamloops were added, and on the east coast St. John’s, Charlottetown and Moncton. In total Swoop at times served more than 30 destinations in Canada, the US, Mexico and the Caribbean.

For package holidays Swoop worked with the Sunwing Travel Group, which sold vacation packages with Swoop flights from Hamilton, Abbotsford, Winnipeg and Edmonton. Interesting in hindsight: the leisure airline Sunwing itself later became part of the WestJet Group – and was also dissolved into WestJet.

Phase	Period	What happened
Announcement	September 2017	WestJet unveils the budget brand Swoop
First flight	June 20, 2018	Hamilton–Abbotsford with a 737-800
USA	from the end of October 2018	Las Vegas, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Phoenix-Mesa
Mexico and Caribbean	Winter 2018/19	Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán, Montego Bay
New aircraft	from 2022	Six Boeing 737 MAX 8s supplement the 737-800s
Integration decision	June 9, 2023	WestJet announces the return to mainline operations
Last day of flying	October 28, 2023	WO638 Toronto–Cancún and back with C-FONK

The fleet: Boeing 737s only

Swoop started with two Boeing 737-800s. The Boeing 737-800 was the backbone of the fleet – at Swoop with 189 seats in all economy. In February 2022 Swoop then announced six Boeing 737 MAX 8s, which joined the fleet from summer 2022.

At the end of flight operations the fleet looked like this:

Type	Number	Seats	Spotter tip
Boeing 737-800	10	189	Classic 737 Next Generation, type code B738
Boeing 737 MAX 8	6	no confirmed figure	New generation, type code B38M

All 16 aircraft passed to WestJet. The manufacturer of both types is Boeing. How to reliably tell a 737-800 from a MAX 8 is shown in the guide Telling the Boeing 737 Original, Classic, NG and MAX apart. The most striking feature is the MAX’s larger engines with a serrated trailing edge on the exhaust nozzle. Which abbreviations trackers show for them is explained in the article on ICAO type codes.

How to recognize Swoop

The Swoop livery was deliberately loud and stood out clearly from WestJet’s understated design. On photos from 2018 to 2023 you recognize it by these features:

• Pink tail with a white line that tapers into a small aircraft silhouette.
• Large “Swoop” logo across the white fuselage – hard to miss, even from a long distance.
• Pink winglets with a white stripe, inside and out in the style of the tail.
• An aircraft name in pink below the cockpit windows on both sides. The first aircraft, for example, bore the name “#Hamilton” – in honor of the first base.

Added to that is the technology: a Swoop aircraft was always a Boeing 737 with a Canadian registration beginning with C-. How Canadian and other registrations are structured is explained in the guide Understanding aircraft registrations.

Canada’s budget flight boom and Swoop’s role in it

Swoop was not alone. In the years after its launch, Canada’s budget flight market became livelier than ever. Flair Airlines repositioned itself as an independent ultra-low-cost airline, and in 2022 Lynx Air joined. Air Canada responded to leisure demand with its subsidiary Air Canada Rouge, which however presents itself more as a vacation brand than as a true budget carrier.

For WestJet, Swoop was thus a shield: the budget subsidiary was meant to attack the competition on its own turf without damaging the prices of the mainline brand. Despite substantial savings on labor costs, though, Swoop never managed to fly profitably on a lasting basis.

In retrospect the trio of Swoop, Lynx and Flair shows how difficult the Canadian market is for budget carriers: long distances, few population centers, harsh winters and strong competition from two established airlines. Swoop was integrated in 2023, Lynx Air ceased operations in 2024 – only Flair remained as an independent budget carrier.

Dispute over the pilots

A core point of the Swoop model was lower labor costs than at WestJet. That led to conflicts early on. Swoop recruited non-unionized pilots from abroad, which the pilots’ union ALPA (Air Line Pilots Association) answered with a kind of recruitment ban. WestJet in turn filed a complaint over unfair labor practices.

The dispute was settled when ALPA withdrew the ban. In March 2019 the Canadian labor authority, the Canada Industrial Relations Board, found that Swoop and WestJet count as a single employer. As a result the pilots of both brands belonged to the same bargaining unit – and the budget subsidiary’s cost advantage was hard to maintain in the long run.

The end: return to the WestJet family

On June 9, 2023, WestJet announced it would fully integrate Swoop into mainline operations. The occasion was a new labor agreement with ALPA that obliged WestJet to take over Swoop routes and aircraft by October 2023. The bases closed one after another: Edmonton and Winnipeg on October 20, Toronto on October 25, 2023.

October 28, 2023 became the last day of flying. As the second-to-last Swoop flight ever, WO638 departed Toronto Pearson for Cancún in the afternoon, operated by the 737-800 C-FONK. The same aircraft’s return flight landed in Toronto shortly after midnight and was thus the last Swoop flight. According to Swoop, the airline had carried just under seven million passengers on more than 40,000 flights in about five years. On October 30, 2023, WestJet reported the integration as complete.

WestJet announced it would retrofit the former Swoop aircraft: instead of all economy, they are to get a premium cabin and Preferred seats – in other words, the normal WestJet product.

Spotting ex-Swoop aircraft today

Swoop as an airline is history, the aircraft are not. The ten 737-800s and six 737 MAX 8s fly for WestJet today and are gradually being repainted in WestJet colors. For a time some aircraft were still operating in a Swoop look – such transitional liveries are especially appealing to collectors, but rarer with every year. Whether a particular aircraft has been repainted by now is best checked through a current photo or the tracker.

The most reliable route to the ex-Swoop jets is the registration. If you know the registration of a former Swoop aircraft like C-FONK, you can track it deliberately – how that works is shown in the guide Tracking an aircraft by registration. If you hunt for oddities like old paint remnants or transitional liveries, you will find tips under Finding special liveries and, for documentation, under Collecting and documenting special liveries.

For spotters in Germany the chance remains slim: Swoop never flew to Europe. Former Swoop 737s are therefore most likely to turn up on trips to Canada, the US, Mexico or the Caribbean.

Common mix-ups

• Taking WO for another airline – in the years 2018 to 2023 the IATA code WO belonged to Swoop.
• Thinking Swoop was an independent airline – Swoop was a subsidiary of WestJet from beginning to end.
• Confusing a pink Canadian 737 with Flair or Lynx – Flair is green, Lynx was purple, Swoop pink with large titles.
• Logging ex-Swoop jets as a new WestJet order – many WestJet 737s have a Swoop past; the registration gives it away.
• Expecting Swoop photos in Europe – the airline flew only in North America, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Conclusion

Swoop was WestJet’s attempt to claim the Canadian budget flight market with a brand of its own in a loud paint scheme. With secondary airports like Hamilton and Abbotsford, an all-737 fleet and nonstop flights to the sun, the airline carried out the ultra-low-cost model consistently. In the end it failed on the question of cost: when the pilots of both brands fell under one agreement, WestJet took Swoop back. For spotters, a closed chapter remains – and 16 Boeing 737s whose registrations carry the story forward.