Originally Posted by 3stripes

As much as it pains me to say it I think we're heading towards a scenario where the majors will shrink even further while regionals and low cost carriers grow and take over the vast majority of domestic flying. The days of the 50 seat regional jet are numbered, but as a previous poster pointed out, the likes of Bombardier, Embraer, Mitsubishi etc are all driving growth in the 70-120 seat jet market.

I firmly believe that in the near future the majors will retrench to concentrating mainly on long haul, international flying with a few transcon services thrown in for good measure. Scope clauses will either become a thing of the past, will be circumnavigated or just ignored and the regionals will take on more capacity on bigger aircraft. We'll never see a 737 or A320 in the regionals, but why would we need to when we have aircraft such as the EMB 195? Domestic flights will mainly be operated by the regionals (still under the brands of the majors). The regionals offer the flexibility that the majors want in the domestic market and take away a lot of the dirty work involved.

In between the majors and the regionals, airlines such as Virgin America, JetBlue etc will continue to do what they do, offering transcon flights, and limited international such as Mexico and the Caribbean.

The regionals will probably move to aircraft such as the Q400 for their 70 seat or less markets while utilising bigger jets such as the MRJ, C-Series or EMB170/190 for their bigger markets.

Sadly, this is just the way it's going these days. Not just here in the US, but also in Europe and Asia. The advent of low fares airlines and in turn the passengers expectation of a $89 transcon one way fare means that the majors have become outdated in their domestic markets with too high a cost base that means they can not directly compete with carriers with a lower cost base such as Southwest, JetBlue etc. By outsourcing their loss making domestic flying to the regionals, the majors can once again return to profitability.

Unfortunately the outcome of all of this will mean less of us going to the majors, worse terms and conditions and the prospect of being a career regional airline pilot. In reality we won't be flying the old definition of a 'regional' flight though. We'll be doing plenty of flights in excess of 2 hours, flying from hub to hub in addition to our current sleepy backwater, small town airport to hub flying. It's already happening, why did I fly on a CRJ from DTW to JFK last month, or from ORD to EWR on an E170 the month before?

This is the reality that we face, not just here in the US, but in Europe (although the majority of flying there is now done by low cost airlines as opposed to regionals) and in Asia too.