I've been saying for years that foreign airframers who gloss over scope limits when designing large RJs are making a big mistake.

It's no longer a simple matter of making a trip through the BK drive-through to eliminate annoying labor contract provisions.

And it's tough for mainline to make money directly operating RJ's close to 100 seats. At the 100 seat point, you have to pay another FA, and that puts the economics in a whole. This is why narrow-bodies's keep getting bigger of the years, to get further away from that 80-149 seat economic trough.

Outsourced flying is the only way to make a lot of RJ routes economical.