The other thing that's going to be interesting to watch is this micro-jet air-taxi concept. It could be good for pilots, for several reasons

1) The air-taxis are obviously targeting some existing airline business, but they are also targeting some road traffic. Take some folks off the road, put 'em airplanes, that's good for us.

2) Any passengers they steal from airlines are now in 6 seat airplanes instead of 36 seat or 50 seat airplanes. Many more pilot jobs per pax.

3) I am highly suspicious of the air taxis' business model. I suspect that their assumption on labor costs is that they can find 800 hour CFI's at the local patch who are willing to fly just for turbine time....well insurance is going to have a say in that. They will either need two pilots, one of whom is at ATP mins, OR possibly a single pilot who already has EXTENSIVE turbine experience.

4) For microjet FO's, If these guys start hiring every CFI in sight, that will dry up the pool for them and the regionals real quick, driving salaries up.

5) For microjet captains, where are they going to get turbine experienced people with ATP mins who are not too costly...RJ FO's!

This could result in a double hiring demand on regional FOs...from the bottom from the CFI ranks and from the current trained and experienced FO's. Regionals might have to start paying signing bonuses!

 

QX currently has 18 Q400s in the fleet, 2 purchased from a Chinese airine (Hainan Airlines Co. Ltd.: each comes with a free order of General Tso's Chicken and fortune cookies) arriving on-line by mid-2006, 12 additional orders arriving in late 2006 through mid-2007, and 20 additional options.

No additional CRJ's on order, so I guess we definitely are not moving in the all-jet direction. Hope it's a good move. The Q400's are supplying plenty of MX headaches and reliability problems. We are even experimenting with 76 and 78 seat configurations.

Air group says that Q400's have very little customer resistance and are overall a better product than the RJ on stage lengths less than 800-900 miles. I suppose we shall see.

 

All new canadair products seem to have bugs at first.

 

ROS or ROW? Last time I flew into RWO all i saw were parked turboprops and no RJ's

 

ROW

Ooops S is next to W.

 

Rickair,

I liked your post about the microjet airtaxi system. I really have not formed much of an opinion on this. I used to work at Adam aircraft, and when we came out with the A700 (seats 6 w/ bathroom, 8 w/out) VLJ, the big buzz was that this new "air taxi" market would come alive. I was skeptical at first(an 8 passenger jet, economics$$).

I think if we can continue to make these VLJ's cheap to operate, you may see this kind of point to point taxi service with more pilot jobs ---> better pay across the board for pilots. I know one thing I want to see in these VLJ's is a cruise altitude above FL450 so we can fly point to point.
Anyway, thanks for the post on what VLJ's can do for the industry. It seems like a good thing.