For anybody that didn’t know this, here is a little factoid that will help you in any dealings with Canadians. Canada is nuts about ice hockey – actually there’s no need to add the ‘ice’ in front because if you ask any Canadian, there is only one kind of ‘hockey’!

During the recent Vancouver Winter Olympics, the country came to a virtual standstill whenever their boys in red and white were on the ice. This was taken to the extreme during the final gold medal match between Canada and the US when passengers on a Vancouver-to-Montreal Air Canada flight refused to board their aircraft when the final boarding call was made. Glued to the screens in the airport departure lounge the plane was delayed until Team Canada scored the winning goal in overtime.

“We incurred a flight delay for a reason Air Canada had not yet encountered in over 72 years of existence,” a grinning chief executive Calin Rovinescu said.

Meanwhile, passengers on board Air Canada flights around the world were kept apprised of the score during the Canada-US showdown by the flight crew, who were receiving real-time updates from operations control. Now there’s a good use of ATC bandwidth!