Originally Posted by Cruz5350

Which is absolutely ridiculous in so many different ways. Now this is all based off of my limited experience in the airline industry from flying a TP, but hear me out. Who doesn't love the fuel savings over the RJ's, and on short trips they just can't be beat. The whole argument of the public hating them is a load of BS as far as I've seen. I think I can count on one hand how many people complained after they got off the plane and that's on a 1900. With that being said I feel like your typical Saab/ATR/Dash is much nicer than the 1900 passenger wise.

I just don't see all the discontent of an efficient airplane.

Originally Posted by Sounder

I flown Q's and RJ's, and I can personally say we get about 10% of the complaints about the jet, that we got about the Q. It seemed like everyone and their mother complained about how they were flying on a "propeller plane", while very few people complain about the "small jet".

Originally Posted by Sounder

I flown Q's and RJ's, and I can personally say we get about 10% of the complaints about the jet, that we got about the Q. It seemed like everyone and their mother complained about how they were flying on a "propeller plane", while very few people complain about the "small jet".

Originally Posted by DashGirl

Your problem here is you see unmatched efficiency and that is simply not the case.

This opinion is understandable for someone to have if said person has not been paying attention. The regional airline industry as a whole is trending towards downsizing. Bigger airframes, fewer flights, fewer frequency, fewer cities. The Q 400 makes no sense for short haul lift and has too many contractual obstacles to overcome to expanding the market share of this airframe on RJ styled stage lengths. No one is making 50 or less seat TP's anymore and only small capacity TP's make sense economically on short stage lengths. Where does that leave us? Why put a Q400 on a route that using a 90 seat or larger RJ would have the same or extremely close fuel burn for the leg time? You like TP's I get it. Unfortunately your assessment is off kilter regarding the reality of the market. It's NOT just about lbs. per hour! If it was there would still be 200 seat four engine TP's plugging around on US routes. Now if Bombardier for example put an updated 200 or 300 back into production then maybe we might see TP's sticking around a bit longer. But unfortunately even if that happened the city pairings between stations spaced by less than 100 miles, the domain of the TP, are drying up. The whole of the EAS system is going away and legacy carriers want less seats and fuller flights with lower operating costs. That means higher capacity airframes, not smaller.

Originally Posted by DashGirl

Yep, the layman perception towards TP's is not positive in general and that is a fact..period. To believe that this is not discussed in the boardrooms of the legacy carriers would be foolish.

Originally Posted by Cruz5350

Well than I guess the Q is just a different beast than most TP's. When I stand next to the prop and deplane the pax I very rarely hear a negative, in fact about 1/4 of the folks say they really enjoyed it.

Originally Posted by zildjian_zach

Its not the ones that get on, its the ones that never book it in the first place. There's a reason Kayak and Expedia have "no prop planes" as a filter option.