It needs 2 cup holders- 1 for a cup of ice and 1 for the soda can.

 

Fix the pay. It has been broken for years.

 

I was wondering if someone was going to bring up the poorly engineered payscale. This is in my opinion the biggest problem with all regional jets. Professional pilots should be paid enough to live on comfortably with a decent quality of life.

 

Well, that same plane (CRJ-200) is flown as a corporate machine for far more money than a US regional might pay.

 

I didn't realize there was a uniform corporate pay scale. Does that come from the Corporate Pilots Union (CPU)?

 

There is switch for maintenance to use when downloading data that is located behind and to the left of the CA's seat that gets flipped all the time when they place, remove or open their flight case.

 

The MAN ALT switch in the upper right corner of the overhead panel iss in a great position to hit bump your head on while climbing in and out of the seat.

 

The layout of the instrument panel was fine IMHO. Could be tweaked a little but I liked it. The analog Standby Attitude Indicator was difficult at best to use due to parallax. The digital version removed that problem but was still just under the usable size for using during an ILS.

The Rockwell Collins FMS was easy enough to use from a 'programing language' and interface point of view.....if...*IF* the keys didn't stick. Can't understand the need to deviate from a 'Qwerty' keyboard, maybe for size(?). Reaching around the Thrust Lever quadrant was a pain, but doable.

I missed the Rockwell when I went to an aircraft with a Universal FMS, but I think it was a law of primacy issue.


Better than most, worse than some.

Over all I miss flying the 'Big Rig' <----- dosbo's avatar.

Just my opinion that I am sure some one will have a problem with.

 

1. I second what everyone says about the cup holder being too small. I think it was made bigger in the -900.

2. Dual FMS - I think some back problems I was having were being caused by my short arms tryign to reach way over to the left side to program the FMS.

3. Ceiling is low (floor too high?). I think that was fixed on the -900 also. Or for some reason I didn't bump my head into the switches as much on the -900.

4. Yoke clip looses tension too easy and the checklist falls on the nasty floor.

Does any of this really matter when the autopilot can barely intercept and track a localizer and randomly turns off, changes speed bug, etc?

 

Amen to that! I've got a permanent indention in my skull from that! haha

George does an excellent job at everything. Very capable autopilot!!! He was my best friend, and never once let me down. In fact, the only A/P in a CRJ that let me down was on a 900, on more than one occasion. For some reason one channel of a yaw damp would continuously disconnect, on different airplanes too... Maybe it was bad karma following me or something! hah!

I don't know what you guys are complaining about. Until you get into some flying contraption built in Brazil (namely the 145), you have NO IDEA how good that 200 is. My God.... its like night and day. I've flown all 3 CRJ variants (2, 7, & 9) and the 200 was my favorite to fly hands down. The 700 was my favorite to go to work on... mainly due to the auto-bleeds, fadec (thank god), fire sys test, and GPS. How many times on the 200's do you get CHECK POS? Of course most of Mesa's 200's didn't have GPS.

But I'm tellin ya, this Embraer is a PIECE OF CRAP compared to that wonderful little Canadair Barbie Jet. I'd take a Mesa 200 (with at least, oh say 5 MELs) any day over a top tier regional EMB 145.


Now, as far as the cockpit layout goes, I have always been very fond of it. I feel everything is in it's right place. They just fixed somethings on the 7 and 9 like the Fire Test and stuff that was just kind of ridiculous. As far as layout, nothing really changed, like I said - things were just "fine tuned" and condensed.