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Air Canada says demand for flights between Canadian and US cities is weak for the spring and summer months, as Canadians respond to the trade war by avoiding trips south.  

Bookings for transborder flights were down 10% for the April-to-September period compared with the same period last year, as of mid-March, according to a presentation at the company’s annual meeting. 

Air Canada is the largest Canadian airline and flies to more US destinations than any other. “Am I concerned?,” Chairman Vagn Sørensen said in a response to a question from a shareholder during Monday’s meeting. “Yes, definitely, I’m concerned.”

Shares of Air Canada are down 35% since the beginning of the year.

Air Canada and WestJet said in separate statements last week that geopolitical tensions are causing some consumers to choose not to take vacations in the US. The shift is part of a larger boycott of American products in response to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his repeated statements that he believes Canada should be part of the US.

Sørensen added that the company is seeing strong demand for transatlantic flights to European destinations. The airline announced Monday that it’s adding flights this summer to cities including Edinburgh, Paris, Athens and Rome. 

US-Canada routes were 22% of Air Canada’s passenger revenue in 2024. 

Air Canada focuses on staying “agile,” Sørensen said, maintaining enough flexibility to redeploy capacity when demand shifts. 

Porter Airlines, a competitor to Air Canada, said Monday it has altered its summer schedule so that domestic routes are 80% of its total capacity, up from 75% in its original plan. The airline said it’s making “targeted frequency reductions in select US markets” but that its overall presence on Canada-US routes will still be larger than last summer. Porter has been expanding capacity as it deploys new Embraer E195-E2 jets.

UK-based Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. also warned Monday that ticket sales on flights originating in the US have weakened in recent weeks, while demand from Europe to the US has held up well so far.

The S&P 500 Passenger Airlines Index dropped more than 6% early Monday before paring those losses to a 1.4% decline as of 1:30 p.m. New York time.

Public opinion polls show that a large majority of Canadians have no interest in joining the US and they disapprove of Trump. A poll by Leger Marketing released last week found only 9% of Canadians would like to be part of the US.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Just after sunrise on Saturday, a satellite set its long-range camera on the city of Mandalay in Myanmar, not far from the epicenter of Friday’s 7.7 magnitude earthquake that devastated the Southeast Asian country’s second-largest city.

The mission was to capture images that, combined with artificial intelligence technology, could help relief organizations quickly assess how many buildings had collapsed or were heavily damaged and where helpers most needed to go.

At first, the high-tech computer vision approach wasn’t working.

“The biggest challenge in this particular case was the clouds,” said Microsoft’s chief data scientist, Juan Lavista Ferres. “There’s no way to see through clouds with this technology.”

The clouds eventually moved and it took a few more hours for another satellite from San Francisco-based Planet Labs to capture the aerial pictures and send them to Microsoft’s philanthropic AI for Good Lab. By then it was already about 11 p.m. Friday at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. A group of Microsoft workers was ready and waiting for the data.

The AI for Good lab has done this kind of AI-assisted damage assessment before, tracking Libya’s catastrophic flooding in 2023 or this year’s wildfires in Los Angeles. But rather than rely on a standard AI computer vision model that could run any visual data, they had to build a customized version specific to Mandalay.

“The Earth is too different, the natural disasters are too different and the imagery we get from satellites is just too different to work in every situation,” Lavista Ferres said. For instance, he said, while fires spread in fairly predictable ways, “an earthquake touches the whole city” and it can be harder to know in the immediate aftermath where help is needed.

Once the AI analysis was complete, it showed 515 buildings in Mandalay with 80% to 100% damage and another 1,524 with between 20% and 80% damage. That showed the widespread gravity of the disaster, but, just as important, it helps pinpoint specific locations of damage.

“This is critical information for teams on the ground,” Lavista Ferres said.

Microsoft cautioned that it “should serve as a preliminary guide and will require on-the-ground verification for a complete understanding.” But in the meantime, the tech company has shared the analysis with aid groups such as the Red Cross.

Planet Labs says its satellites — it has 15 of them orbiting the Earth — have now photographed roughly a dozen locations in Myanmar and Thailand since Friday’s quake.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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