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Porter is limited in where it can fly with its existing fleet of Bombardier Q400 turboprops, which have a maximum range of about 2,000 kilometres, and had hoped to offer a variety of new destinations, out of Toronto, using the CSeries including Vancouver, California and the Caribbean.

That won’t happen for the foreseeable future, but Porter hasn’t walked away from its conditional order, worth as much as US$2.08 billion at list prices, for up to 30 CS100 jets from Bombardier.

“Our deposits are still in place for the original conditional order,” Deluce said in an interview Tuesday.

He cautioned not to read too much into that, but added that Porter wants to keep its options open. The Toronto-based airline has a fleet of 29 planes and operates flights in Eastern Canada and the northeastern seaboard in the U.S.

“There may be opportunities for us to operate the CS100 aircraft from various other airports in the future if that ends up being the right direction for Porter at that time,” Deluce said.

For now, the airline has no plans to add any additional routes. Porter bought three more Q400s, worth US$93 million at list price, from Bombardier last week and Deluce said those will be used to “reinforce” its existing network and improve schedule reliability.

“We’re still at the point where we’re assessing what the right longer-term move is for Porter,” he said.

“It isn’t to say that in a couple of years or so we won’t look again at adding destinations, that’s a real possibility, but right now the focus is on making sure that our already award-winning service stays at a very high level and we’d like to take it even higher.”