Originally Posted by
reCALcitrant
From what I understand, of course I'm not a Harvard MBA
, the RVSM on the planes are all lower than the 73 or Bus. If mngmt is smart (I know, I know) they'll let this happen and continue to shift flying back into mainline. The smaller airplanes are just not getting it done at a competitive price with fuel at 100/bbl. If I were king of the world, there wouldn't be a regional flying at my airline unless it had about 25 seats and served places where people are willing to pay a premium to fly out of for convenience.
I assume you mean RASM (revenue per available seat mile), not RVSM?
The CASM (cost per available seat mile) is higher on regional aircraft, but they cook the numbers to show that they get higher RASM on regional jets. It all depends on how you divide up the portions of a ticket that has multiple stops/aircraft changes. It's accounting sleight of hand for the most part.
Example: TUS-MCO. The trip is TUS-IAH (RJ) and IAH-MCO (mainline). Suppose the ticket is $150 each way. Now make the TUS-IAH leg cost $100 and the IAH-MCO leg cost $50 for accounting purposes.
We're back to a point in the business where most city pairs have more than enough daily frequency. Reducing 2 RJs to 1 737/A319 keeps the available seats to the city pair approximately neutral but reduces the cost. The loss is one daily flight for that city pair. But when you've got 6 or 7 daily RJ flights, the reduction to 5 or 6 RJs + 1 mainline will probably have minimal impact on passenger demand. It may even be greater for the mainline flight since many people prefer to fly on mainline aircraft.