A year later, James Awad would not repeat his party in a Sunwing flight

A year after having organized one of the most controversial parties of the pandemic with DJ and alcohol on a Sunwing plane, James William Awad admits that if it were to start over, he would not do this party which aroused the ire of the four corners of the planet.

• Read also: Entrepreneur wants James Awad to pay him $150,000

“I have no regrets,” says Awad, with a mocking smile. On the other hand, if I had known a day before leaving what was going to happen… I would not have done it because of the bad surprises.

the Log met him on Monday at his luxurious estate in Bois-des-Filion. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that this 29-year-old Quebecer was a complete stranger at this time last year.

It was on December 30, 2021 that his life and those of dozens of partygoers with him were turned upside down. During this day, James Awad gathered more than 170 people to party in a charter plane to Mexico. They broke many rules, like smoking or drinking to drunkenness mid-flight.

Video taken from noechart_’s Instagram

Quebec announced at the same time a curfew and a worrying increase in cases of COVID-19. All restaurants, bars and cinemas were closed at the time. Even the return to school in January was postponed due to the health emergency.

“Before I even left, I told my friends that we would surely make the news. But I didn’t think it was going to take on global proportions,” he says, sitting next to a telescope with which he can observe the sky in detail or even the many curious people who now come to spy on his palace on the Rive. -North of Montreal.

They didn’t believe it

Several participants would have registered for this trip with one of his companies, the 111 Private Club, thinking that it would never materialize.

“People thought it was fake. As if it was impossible at that time for an event to take everyone on a plane. I told them it was not the Fyre-FestivalAwad laughs. He is referring here to festival-goers trapped in 2017 on an island in the Bahamas without a cell phone network, running water or electricity.

According to him, his biggest blunder is letting his customers take videos on the plane and then post them on social media. These images have indeed aroused popular commotion.

“If people hadn’t posted these videos on Instagram or elsewhere, there wouldn’t have been this scandal,” he said. It’s my mistake, I should have told them not to release nothing on the Internet until the end of the event. Like this, once you get here, whateverit wouldn’t have bothered me.”

real consequences

The revelers on the flight to Mexico were therefore the authors of their own misfortunes. Dozens of videos made international headlines after the Log first revealed this controversy last January.

“When I saw the story made it to Jimmy Fallon’s TV show [aux États-Unis], the stress was quite high, recalls the entrepreneur. A Sunwing employee was sent to the hotel in Mexico to meet with us. They eventually canceled our flight home because it was all over the news and they wanted to take action. I myself reimbursed everyone’s individual tickets to return and their hotel. It cost me $75,000.

One of the most viral sequences is also the one where we see a vaper smoking in the Sunwing plane. Subsequently, we learned that the young woman was a future pilot. Heavy criticism has been leveled at him. Vanessa Sicotte, nicknamed Vanessa Cosi on social networks, is still an aviation student according to our information.

“I talk to him from time to time. All is chill and his life is going well”, briefly mentions James William Awad, without revealing more details.

Sad for the lawyer in the thong

Unlike Ms. Sicotte, a future lawyer filmed with a thong on her face during this journey paid top dollar for this excursion to the South. Frédérique Dumas-Joyal went viral in turn with this video of her in Tulum with panties as a “mask”.

“Una piña colada”, launches laughingly the young woman in this sequence. In February 2022, Ms. Dumas-Joyal filed a lawsuit against the Bar because she accuses it of delaying too long in allowing her to practice her profession. She is now registered as a lawyer in the bar directory, but does not seem to be attached to any firm.

Video posted on RachelCantin’s Instagram account

“It’s sad what happened to her. I feel bad for her. She wears the thong in a bar and has fun. The fact that it appears on the news, that’s a shame. We all did stupid things when we were young, ”he admits.

Certainly, but why have filmed and published these sequences heavy with consequences? “Yes, it’s a mistake,” drops the young man.

A former Sutton Quebec realtor, who partyed on the Sunwing flight, has been suspended by his employer because of the Sunwing flight. Karl Bernard had been seen in a video where he dances in the cabin with a speaker in his hands.

Mr. Bernard seems to have found a new job, still as a broker, at RE/MAX Québec in Saint-Jérôme.

No regrets, despite the pandemic

On several occasions during the interview with our representative, James William Awad affirms that he “regrets nothing” about this misadventure.

The young entrepreneur even claims to have boosted the turnover of all his companies, including TripleOne, the Crusty Crust pizzerias and his private club with which he orchestrated the theft of Sunwing.

“I had no consequences on my professional life. I also had benefits in my personal life,” he explains vaguely, without giving any supporting evidence.

Did it feel bad for the exhausted healthcare workers battling COVID-19 in hospitals? And for all Quebecers isolated in December 2021, when he was organizing a party at the same time with a hundred people ignoring health rules at an altitude of more than 30,000 feet?

“No because it was not illegal to go on a trip. In life, you can’t deprive yourself of certain things just because some do,” Awad justifies himself.

This Journal report is the first in a series of three articles covering the “one year” of Sunwing’s flight which had the effect of a media eclipse in January 2022.