Originally Posted by
9mikemike
I understand that our other sister-carrier OO is also running new hire classes. I suppose good for both of them....No Question as to why. Alaska Airlines can get a fully crewed Horizon jet and a fully crewed Skywest jet for less then it costs to crew a single Alaska jet. 2.5 to 1 deal....
CASMs are still a lot lower on narrowbodies, especially the longer ones. Most regional flying is not done to get lower costs, it's for a variety of other reasons...
- Loads. If you carry up to 70 pax, yes the RJ is more cost effective. Anything over that and one NB is cheaper than 2-3 RJ's.
- Frequency. Customers like frequency... a lot. While one daily NB would be cheaper than 3 RJ's, most of the customers would fly on somebody else with a better schedule. This is key and lots of pilots don't seem to get this, our customers today want a flight within 2-3 hours of what works for them, not a daily milk run, most especially if they have to sit in a hub for a connection.
If you can fill up (to a reasonable load factor) two or maybe three daily NB's, any airline manager in his right will go with the NB's.
- With all that said, if regional flying is under a contract (OO is, no idea for QX), then it would be more cost effective to fly the RJ's since you have to pay for them anyway, and park NB's since you can save money by not operating your own fleet. This is normally an artificial and transient situation which occurs early in a downturn while majors are stuck with pre-downturn FFD contracts... those will eventually get adjusted to make economic sense in whatever future environment comes to pass.
RJ's are not all bad for legacy hub 'n spoke pilots, they're a key part of the business model. Just need some scope to help manage it...