A hotly anticipated tourist attraction has quietly delayed its projected opening twice since first announced in 2019.

The new flying motion ride at the base of the CN Tower, known as FlyOver Canada, has been in the works for five years now and is currently advertising a planned 2025 opening on its website.

The tourist draw was initially expected to enter into development in late 2020 and projected to open its doors in 2022. However, like many projects planned pre-2020, progress fell by the wayside when the world shut down, and the tourism market crashed amid a public health crisis.

FlyOver Canada. Rendering by Sturgess Architecture.

By the initial planned opening year of 2022, the attraction's website had been quietly updated to advertise a 2024 opening. By late 2023, that date had once again been pushed to 2025, with no announcements about the new attraction since a 2020 press release.

Five years after first announced, shovels for the project still have not hit the ground as new FlyOver attractions open elsewhere in the world, and one similar ride is even on the way in another GTA city.

There has been radio silence from Pursuit Collection, the company that manages the project, as well as landowner Canada Lands Company. However, the stalled permitting process for this attraction offers some clues into the goings-on behind the scenes.

Most of the project's permits were closed by the City in 2021 in a ready-to-issue state but were not addressed by the owner, leaving FlyOver in a state of limbo.

Despite the stalled permit process, Pursuit's owner, Viad Corp, released a Q4 2023 statement earlier this year that mentions "costs related to the development of Pursuit's new FlyOver attractions in Chicago and Toronto, and Forest Park Hotel in Canada."

FlyOver has opened new attractions since the still-unrealized Toronto ride was announced in 2019, mot recently debuting a new ride at Chicago's Navy Pier in March.

In anticipation of the ride's eventual landing in Toronto, I took a few flights on the Las Vegas version of the attraction during a 2023 visit to preview its multiple ride experiences, including one show featuring a flight over the Canadian Rockies.

Anyone frustrated over the series of delays should rest assured that, despite the changing timelines, this is indeed one that will be worth the wait if things come to fruition.

FlyOver's recently-opened attraction on the Las Vegas Strip. Photo by Jack Landau.

The experience will put riders in a motion theatre, dangling in front of a massive 23-metre x 17.5-metre spherical screen playing films coordinated with special effects like motion, mist, wind, and scents that simulate the experience of flying more than 6,000 kilometres across Canada.

While FlyOver Canada's Toronto attraction appears to have stalled on takeoff, a similar ride is already in the works for an existing amusement centre in Oshawa. The upcoming SuperFly motion theatre ride at NEB's Fun World could very well beat FlyOver to launch despite being announced four years after the downtown Toronto attraction was first revealed.

blogTO has reached out to Pursuit Collection/FlyOver which will operate the attraction, and the Canada Lands Company that owns the land it will be built on, and will update this article if additional details are provided.