Canadian regional carrier Porter Airlines (PD/POE), based opposite the Toronto skyline, is probably North America's most unusual scheduled airline. For Robert Deluce and his company, Porter Airlines, 2015 will be a crucial year. The 61 year-old aviation entrepreneur from Toronto, whose family founded other now-defunct Canadian carriers such as Air Ontario and Canada 3000, is betting his company's fortune on two major developments scheduled for 2015. This could mean that his airline, founded in 2006, will well advance in maturity. The first development is scheduled to happen in March, when the carrier's unique home airport will acquire a fixed lifeline to the mainland with the opening of a long-delayed pedestrian tunnel. Proposed back in 1935, the tunnel project was made obsolete by a ferry service established in 1938, and running until this day. Decades later, a bridge was approved in 1997 and cancelled in 2003, further delaying the tunnel project. This 240-meter-long tunnel certainly has had a checkered history. "The tunnel will be a game changer," Deluce enthused to Airways from his small, cluttered office.
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