Every May long weekend, Canadians light fireworks, open the cottage, and raise a quiet toast to a monarch who never set foot on Canadian soil. Victoria Day — celebrated this year on May 18 — has marked the unofficial start of summer since 1845, honouring Queen Victoria's birthday and Canada's enduring constitutional heritage. It's a holiday defined by long weekends, sparklers, and the smell of a season finally turning.
But Queen Victoria's name didn't stay put. It travelled. It landed on cities, a river, an Australian state, and — perhaps most fittingly for a world that moves by air — a surprising number of airports. She was famously said to be "not amused." We'd like to think the airports might change her mind.
YYJ: The One That Started It All
Victoria International Airport (YYJ) serves Victoria, British Columbia — the city that wears her name most proudly. Perched on the southern tip of Vancouver Island in North Saanich, YYJ is the gateway to one of Canada's most beloved cities: a place of harbour views, afternoon tea, and a civic identity that leans into its British roots without apology.
On Victoria Day weekend, YYJ is one of the busiest departure points in the province. Mainlanders fly in for the long weekend; islanders fly out to visit family. The airport hums with the particular energy of a holiday that feels both national and deeply local.
If you're looking for something that captures that Victoria feeling — the harbour, the history, the quiet pride of a city that knows exactly what it is — our Victoria BC collection is a good place to start.
YWH: The Airport That Lands on Water
A few kilometres from YYJ, Victoria Inner Harbour Airport (YWH) offers a very different arrival experience. This is a water aerodrome — a floatplane base tucked into the heart of downtown, primarily served by Harbour Air's seaplane routes connecting Victoria to Vancouver, the Gulf Islands, and beyond.
There is no runway at YWH. Planes land on the harbour itself, pulling up to a dock while the Inner Harbour's pedestrian promenade carries on a few metres away. It is, by most measures, one of the more cinematic ways to arrive in any Canadian city. Queen Victoria, who presided over the golden age of steam and the birth of modern infrastructure, might have found the whole thing rather remarkable.
YMY: The Airport That Lived on a Parking Lot
Here is where the story gets genuinely interesting.
Victoria STOLport, assigned the airport code YMY, was a short take-off and landing aerodrome that operated near downtown Montreal in the mid-1970s — built, of all places, on the former parking lot of Expo 67. It was not a permanent airport. It was an experiment.
The federal government, through the Canadian Air Transport Administration, wanted to test whether STOL service could work as a practical commuter corridor. They chose the Montreal–Ottawa route: 250 kilometres, 2.5 million travellers per year, and two cities whose downtown cores were close enough to make short-haul air travel genuinely competitive with driving.
Airtransit Canada — a wholly owned Air Canada subsidiary incorporated in June 1973 — launched the service with six de Havilland DHC-6-300 Twin Otters, those rugged, reliable workhorses of Canadian aviation. The Ottawa end of the route used Rockcliffe Airport, chosen for its proximity to the capital's core. Regular flights began in early 1974.
The demonstration ran for two years. Data was collected. Passengers were surveyed. Economics were evaluated. And then the service was discontinued, the STOLport decommissioned, and the site eventually transformed into the Montreal Technoparc technology park — a quiet, unglamorous end for an airport that was always meant to be temporary.
YMY never had a Victoria collection. It barely had a terminal. But it had a name, a code, and a brief, earnest life in the history of Canadian aviation — and that feels worth remembering on the weekend named for the queen it honoured.
VCT: Yes, Even Texas
Victoria Regional Airport (VCT) serves Victoria, Texas — a mid-sized city on the Gulf Coast coastal plain, about halfway between Houston and Corpus Christi. The Victoria in question was named after Guadalupe Victoria, the first president of Mexico, which makes the naming lineage slightly more complicated than it appears.
Still: an airport named Victoria, in a city named Victoria, in a state that does not typically lean into its British colonial heritage. The world is full of surprises.
If you're in Victoria, Texas — or just fond of the airport code — our VCT collection has you covered.
ZIC: The One in Chile
Victoria Airport (ZIC) serves Victoria, Chile — a small city in the Araucanía region, roughly 700 kilometres south of Santiago. It is a modest regional facility, and the Victoria in question was also named after Queen Victoria during a period of British commercial influence in South America in the 19th century.
It is a long way from the Inner Harbour. But the name made it there.
VFA: The One by the Falls
Victoria Falls International Airport (VFA) serves one of the most dramatic destinations on the African continent. The falls themselves were named by David Livingstone in 1855 — he called them Mosi-oa-Tunya in the local Tonga language, "the smoke that thunders," but gave them a second name in honour of his queen. The name stuck, and the city, the airport, and the UNESCO World Heritage Site all carry it today.
VFA sits on the Zimbabwean side of the falls, with Zambia's Harry Mwanga Nkumbula International Airport on the other bank. It is a long way from a Montreal parking lot or a Texas coastal plain — but the thread is the same. A 19th-century monarch, a name given in tribute or in colonial ambition or both, and an airport code that outlasted the era that created it.
MEL: An Entire State in Her Honour
Perhaps the most expansive expression of Queen Victoria's legacy in aviation isn't a single airport — it's an entire Australian state.
Victoria, Australia was named after the queen in 1851, during her reign and at the height of the gold rush that transformed the colony. Today, the state is home to nearly seven million people, and its primary gateway is Melbourne Airport (Tullamarine), known by the code MEL. Located about 23 kilometres from the CBD, MEL handles the bulk of international and domestic traffic for the region. Avalon Airport (AVV), near Geelong, serves as a secondary option, popular with low-cost carriers.
There is no airport in Victoria, Australia called Victoria Airport. The state simply absorbed the name entirely — every flight in and out of the region is, in a sense, a Victoria flight.
Our Melbourne collection is the closest we get to putting that legacy on a mug.
A Legacy That Keeps Landing
Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901. In that time, she oversaw the expansion of the British Empire, the growth of the railway, the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable, and the early stirrings of powered flight — though she did not live to see an airplane leave the ground. She died three years before Kitty Hawk.
And yet her name is on airports on four continents. It's on a floatplane dock in a harbour she never saw. It's on a decommissioned parking lot in Montreal. It's on a regional strip in Texas, a modest runway in Chile, and an international airport beside one of the world's great waterfalls. It's on the gateway to an Australian state that has carried her name for 175 years.
Every Victoria Day long weekend, travellers pass through terminals and departure gates that bear her legacy — most of them without a second thought. Whether you're flying out of YYJ for the long weekend, connecting through MEL, or somehow finding yourself at VCT, you're moving through a world she helped name.
We think she'd be amused.
Whether your Victoria is on Vancouver Island, the Gulf Coast, or the other side of the world, we make gifts that travel well. Browse our Victoria BC, Victoria Texas, and Melbourne collections.
