Originally Posted by
iahflyr
The CRJ-550 is a great product. It’s 50 seats on a 70 aircraft. It keeps our scope limit at 50 seats while providing a good product for our customers on 50 seat routes. Like it or not, there are some markets that need service on a 50 seater, or else they will disappear. Not only do we lose that revenue, but we lose the revenue once they get to our hubs and want to connect on. 50 seaters are not going to replace mainline jobs today. Not with fuel prices, pilot labor supply, lack of gates, lack of runways, etc… The CRJ-550 there to replace our CRJ-200’s which are crap.
I do expect the CRJ-550 weight increase in some form to be in our next TA, and I will support it.
Are you insane?
Now is the time to ram the scope genie back into the bottle, not give management a workaround on it. We have them against the ropes and you want to give them more scope?
They can fly the 550’s now as large RJ’s. Give some of the -700/170 flying to mainline and viola, you still have room for 50 seat service to tiny cities. There is nothing preventing them from configuring a 700 with fifty seats. The -550 is an artificial airplane for scope purposes only. I would also be potentially amenable to raising the weight on the 550 in return for capping the number of 50 seat RJ’s at 1/4 of the current cap to help kill off any idea of any new 50 seat RJ’s coming down the pipe (Embraer is already working on a shrunken 170). Any change to scope has to result in a net narrowing of scope for me.