Waiting for Porter. Thinking about Porter, Too.

For months and months I've been waiting for Porter Airlines, the swank Canadian carrier on Tyler Brûlé's Winkreative design agency client list, to begin flying to New York. The airline announced its intention to fly in and out of Newark months ago. Thus far, no dice.

I'm getting impatient. I'm distressed by how expensive it is to fly from New York to Toronto and Montreal, not to open up the question of pricing on connecting flights to cities farther west, like Winnipeg. But if flying to Canada from New York is going to remain artificially expensive, I'd like for it to be at the very least exciting. The options currently consist of dusty US airlines and Air Canada. The former, with the exception of JetBlue, which does not fly to any airports in Canada, are shoddy and unexciting and bland; Air Canada, quite tragically in my view, doesn't offer much better. (Air Canada has squandered one of the greatest branding opportunities around. Ahh, to think of the physical and cultural material that could be manipulated into a stunning Air Canada branding maneuver! How thrilling it would be to take that particular project on.)

More on that another time, perhaps.

It's my spendthrift side—not my shoestring essence—that wants to fly Porter. The airline is not a low-cost carrier by any means. It is, rather, a niche business-oriented carrier that offers a particular experience of flying, from decent in-flight service to beautiful modern airport lounges to (apparently) smart flight attendant uniforms, and all without the exorbitant fares that one might assume that a business-primed airline of its ilk would demand. Porter flies Bombardier Dash 8 Q400s, which are far more fuel-efficient than most other commercial airplanes. Best of all for those wanting to get in or out of central Toronto, Porter flies from Toronto City Centre Airport, a five-minute ferry ride from downtown.

I can't comment on Porter's ad campaigns, which I've heard are a bit of a mess, but the airline's brand is both cozy and elegant. Its straight lines and restrained modernism are broken only slightly by the choice of a raccoon as brand icon. That said, I find the Porter raccoon to be cute and woodsy, a pairing that, um, fits Canada awfully well—though I sense from brief online research that I am in the minority on the raccoon's iconic merits.

All these observations boil down to this: I can't remember the last time I left an airline Web site with a sense of that airline's personality. Against this trend, Porter exudes a sense of itself. To put the airline into a meaningful comparative context, look at the Porter site next to the VLM site. VLM, a Belgian airline that also pursues a business demographic, runs a site that flees from brand identity altogether. The images appear to have been carelessly, randomly chosen. Meanwhile, Porter communicates a kind of accessible luxury through its consistent style.

All this may be irrelevant. Porter's imminent demise was forecast this past spring by Barry Avich, a Toronto ad man; a subsequent piece in TIME made many of the same points (and quoted Avich, to boot.) Both articles point out that the airline is not fillings its seats. If these comments are on target and the airline still isn't able to fill its seats, then it would appear that Porter won't be around for long.

I for one am hoping that things have already turned around.