Originally Posted by DashGirl

Your problem here is you see unmatched efficiency and that is simply not the case.

This opinion is understandable for someone to have if said person has not been paying attention. The regional airline industry as a whole is trending towards downsizing. Bigger airframes, fewer flights, fewer frequency, fewer cities. The Q 400 makes no sense for short haul lift and has too many contractual obstacles to overcome to expanding the market share of this airframe on RJ styled stage lengths. No one is making 50 or less seat TP's anymore and only small capacity TP's make sense economically on short stage lengths. Where does that leave us? Why put a Q400 on a route that using a 90 seat or larger RJ would have the same or extremely close fuel burn for the leg time? You like TP's I get it. Unfortunately your assessment is off kilter regarding the reality of the market. It's NOT just about lbs. per hour! If it was there would still be 200 seat four engine TP's plugging around on US routes. Now if Bombardier for example put an updated 200 or 300 back into production then maybe we might see TP's sticking around a bit longer. But unfortunately even if that happened the city pairings between stations spaced by less than 100 miles, the domain of the TP, are drying up. The whole of the EAS system is going away and legacy carriers want less seats and fuller flights with lower operating costs. That means higher capacity airframes, not smaller.