Stealing mainline flying?
 

***I don't want this to be a flame fest as it's being posted for actual debate.***

It's almost impossible to count how many times people have said, "The more regionals there are the less main line flying there is". I read this all the time. You see people posting things like "the legacy guys are lossing more and more of their flying to regionals". Has anyone actually crunched any numbers?

I didn't go severly in-depth here but take a look at this. http://www.bts.gov/programs/airline_...ers/index.html I was looking at Continental over the years and they currently employ more people and fly more than they ever did before. So for those constantly saying that mainline flying is going south because of 175's and CRJ 900's where is it showing this? Did any major actually fly into places like Akron and Dayton Ohio prior to regional service? (Rhetorical)

The questions I don't know are this. What mainline routes that use to exist and were of higher capacity were given away to regionals? What current regional routes do you think mainline would be able to support?

Ok well how about EWR to IAD, Surely CAL could fly 3 737's there a day instead of 9 flights on the ERJ.................... I dont think CAL actually has the a/c to do this, but the point being there are a lot of routes done by the RJ that could be supported by a mainline A/C, less frequency however............

PS. Regional pilots never stole anything they were given the routes by MAINLINE Bean counters..................why pay a 737 rates when there are people lining up to fly CRJ-900's for less than half the rates..........We all get ****ed off at each other, "you stole my flying blah blah blah", Lets not forget, we as pilots have very little say in anything! Its the Greedy few in upper management that pit us against each other and watch each regional whor themselves out for a lower price.................The regionals fly as many jets as they do, both large and small because of MAINLINE MANAGEMENT..........

175's and CRJ900 are mainline aircraft, plain and simple.

There has been a definate shift towards regional. CAL and SWA may be bigger, but none of the other legacies are as large as they were in 2001.

The shift is not totally driven by low labor costs...PAX absolutely love frequency. I don't think you could operate two RJ's any cheaper than one 737, but the RJ's can go twice as often.

Somebody already mentioned that regional pilots don't steal mainline flying (they may steal from themselves a la gayway). Regionals only perform mainline flying which was handed to them by mainline pilots who traded their scope for something else, or scope relaxed in bankruptcy (even that is negotiated).

Mainline sized airplanes anyway. ie DC-9, 90 pax; A318, 107 pax; 737-100, 100 pax; 737-600 110 pax;

This might be the best paragraph in this thread. This says it all. Had the majors not budged on scope the RJs would still exist, but they'd be flown by mainline pilots on mainline seniority lists. I'd love that. The low pay sucks, but knowing that I had an ability to bid to larger aircraft, that pay proportionately better would be worth it. However, the mainline guys gave this chance away, and somehow it's our fault for flying them.

PS: TWA regularly flew DC-9s into smaller destinations like COU and SPI back in the day.

I looked around and found this on the same site. So they flew more in 2001. I was mistaken then in my first statement. As I said I didn't spend a whole lot of time digging through there. However they were losing money which would end up worse in the long run had 9/11 happened or not.

Very good point. I'd like to talk to someone in a management position to find out the big downfalls. I guess I could see benefits, stock purchase plans, 401k contributions, and other things along that line being issues.

AA toyed with the idea when they were flying the F100....they even wanted / talked about the AA guys flying the F70....... plain and simple the mainline pilots wouldnt fly the F70 for the what company wanted....and the company didnt think they could fly it profitably for what the pilots wanted thus the BLOSSOM of regional jets. In those days AE flew NO jets ... the ATR-42 and a few 72's were the only big things they had.... Jetstreams, shorts 360's.... saabs.... for the most part the mainline #of seats per acft has increased and it certainly has increased at so called regional airlines....

In '95 they were flown by mainline pilots, at Air Canada. They replaced the Dash-8s Air Ontario had been flying into CLE.