ALPA and the company sold RJ relief to the pilots in form of, “we can buy 777’s and 744’s or RJ’s but not both. The RJ will be used only to supplement mainline flying to give passengers more options. If we offer 3 mainline DEN to OMA now we will add 3 RJ’s in the shoulder times to give the customers more options. It will not come at a loss of mainline jobs”. That was all well and good until 9/11. The only limit we had for scope was 1:1 block hour. When a 16 hour flight from ORD to HKG took off that allowed for 16 one hour RJ flights. Our ALPA “experts “ dropped the ball. There was a formula that had to be met to allow RJ’s to take over whole markets and it was weak also. It took almost twenty five years to put the genie back in the bottle but it has finally happened. I still have stickers that say RJUA as we wanted all the flying in house back then

in my opinion the longevity at the RJ carriers also helped move flying back to mainline. Those long term pilots at the RJ ops want pay and benefits near mainline wages. Those wages aren’t supported by the seats they fly. It’s all the fee for departure.

It was a bad time back then. Have you heard about the “guppy killer” stickers that E170 republic pilots had floating around ? A serious lack of SA to wheel those into the ORD cafeteria back in the day.