Originally Posted by
24/48
The CR7's certainly fit a market that the Ejet does not. We are still parking 15 of them this year to 100 CR7's in the UAX fleet. As the UAL scope matures it limits the number of 70 seaters to 102 I believe. The ancillary revenue from Wi-Fi, Econ Plus, etc. makes the investment worth it, even if the CR7's only have 7-10 years left.
Considering that regionals can't fill classes right now, the last thing UAL wants to see is cancellations for "no crew" at UAX. That is what happened with XJT that played a part in them losing all those 145's. I think we are going to start seeing more and more flying return to mainline, after all that is where the applicants are. 50 seaters should be parked no later than 5 years from now, CR7's not too far behind that, IMO.
Thats not why the XJET 145 fleet is shrinking. While there are many factors a big one is that XJET and Skywest Inc had an unprofitable CPA. So they had a multi prong approach to fixing this- which among the goals were to renegotiate a more favorable CPA and to go after performance incentives in the CPA. In order to accomplish this they meet with UAL and shortened the overall contract term (and got better terms) and plan to passively allow aircraft to fall off lease without pursuing a renewal. As a result the ERJ side of XJET is properly staffed and consistently produces some of the top performance in the UAL system.