Originally Posted by
SkyWest
I'm not complaining about anything. I am wondering if we're trying to cram too many people into too many little RJs instead of admitting that there should be larger gauge (such as a 737, ...in reality) on some of these routes..
To some extent they probably do this just because the labor is that much cheaper. But RJ's also offer a significant competitive advantage: Frequency.
Pax actually like having many choices in departure time. At one point my home town had like 6-7 daily J's to the DAL hub...sure made the commute easy. You could put all those pax on one 747 and it would be cheaper to do just one flight but you would lose a lot of customers to other airlines.
But as fule costs and landing slot congestion increase the cost of RJ's will probably outweigh the benefits and we'll be back to 2-3 daily NB's or even one WB. Bigger airplanes cost less per seat and obviously don't use as many landing/departure slots.