Originally Posted by
threeighteen
Yeah but when you start shrinking big planes to smaller, they don't get lighter by the same percentage of seats you took out. It would be extremely difficult to create a 50 seat E175 that would fit under the 65,000lb MTOW limit in the UPA and still have range comparable to a CRJ700 or E175.
Wow I had no idea...
So instead of recapturing the less than two hour flights with A319s, you want to lose MORE of those longer routes to bigger RJs...? because that's the argument you're making here.
1. Who's gonna fly that clean sheet 50 seat turboprop? Can't even find people to fly the 50 seat jets. Can barely find mechanics to keep them running these days either.
2. Who says that SBN-ORD 5x a day on a CRJ2 can't be replaced by SBN-ORD 2x a day on an A319? Or they could do what they do in DEN and just switch it to a bus. Either of those would free up a lot of space in ORD and save a lot of money on fuel/labor.
The issue here is that you don't want to lose MORE routes to RJs like the 175 with longer (3-4) range... but for some reason you're arguing that it's actually a good idea to let them have more 175s to do this.
We're not losing routes to the 175. Exactly the opposite is happening. 175s are getting parked (Mesa) because there aren't enough pilots to fly them. The reason you see a 175 on a DEN-RIC turn is not because the 175 is so much cheaper to operate, its because mainline doesn't have a spare A/C. 175s will take over 50 seat routes and mainline will take over 76 seat routes. This has already been happening.