"SkyWest President Chip Childs states
with oil prices at $150 a barrel, a larger
70-seat turboprop is a ‘no-brainer,’ but at
lower levels of $80-100 a barrel the
economics are ‘on the thin line.’
He concludes there is not an ideal
replacement option for the 30-seat EMB-
120s and CRJ200s, and believe a 50-
seat turboprop would be suitable for a lot
of missions carried out by those aircraft.
But airframers have little interest in
creating a high-speed 50-seat turboprop.
Bombardier built 267 50-seat Q300s but
the aircraft was much slower, at 287kt,
than the Q400s 360kt. The
manufacturer told the summit in
Albuquerque that shrinking the Q400 to
50 seats was not viable because the
capacity would not support the cost of the
higher-power engines.
‘You need enough chairs to cover the
speed,’ said director of market development
Jerome Cheung, who added that 50-seat
high-speed turboprops had struggled to
meet large-scale demand. For example,
only about 60 Saab 2000s were produced.
Childs said if the airline had more
visibility on the outcome of scope talks, it
may have made an aircraft decision by
now. A dual-class Q400 looked
attractive, he said, but evaluations rest on
the economics of a larger turboprop and
‘what happens with scope.’"