Quote:
Originally Posted by skylover
What will be the replacement of the hundreds of CRJ and ERJ145 planes in service today? The CRJ1000?
So naive you are in the ways of the airlines, young padawan. If I could answer that question for you then I wouldn't be working, that's for sure. But I can speculate and talk out of my butt with the best of 'em so here goes...
There will probably not be another 50-seat jet produced in the numbers of the CRJ and ERJ unless there is some radical change in engine technology or fuels used. Now, you build a jet that can efficiently burn natural gas for a CASM at or below current levels, that would be a game changer and I may revisit that statement. The airlines just binged on the RJ when it was new and oil was cheap, they built and bought WAY too many of them and are now are suffering from "50-seat hangover".
Just because the CRJ1000 is a newer airplane and starts with the letters "C R J" doesn't mean that its the logical replacement for all the current sub-70 seat RJs out there. For one thing, it is NOT an RJ. It's twice the size of the -200 and E145 and falls well outside the scope clauses for most (all?) majors, as it should. It's a DC-9 for Christ's sake! Skinnier and pointier, yes, but still a DC-9. Now, assuming scope clauses hold and fuel prices continue to increase, you may see some of the mainline carriers start to fill the gaps in their load-capability with some of the larger E-Jets and/or CRJs. Those aircraft would then be deployed on some of the routes where it's no longer efficient to send 8 50-seat RJs a day and where you might be better served sending a CRJ1000 or E-190 twice a day at peak connection times and a 50-seat RJ 3 or 4 times a day off-peak. Of course, the airlines hate to lose frequency more than they like to make money so that outcome is doubtful at best.
Then again, this could all be a bunch of BS because the big airlines really have not shown much interest in the CRJ1000. The thing has been on sale for almost 5 years now and only sold 55 frames. Not what I'd call flying off the shelves. More realistically, this is what I see happening:
- More CRJ7/900s and E170s out there replacing some of the 50-seaters on the larger markets where the 50s have no business being anyway.
- The short and dense stuff being taken over by the larger turboprops (ala UAL with the Q400s).
- Number of 50-seaters out there will continue to slowly decline, say another 15-20% from current levels but that will eventually level off.
Despite what you may have heard, the rumors of the death of the 50-seater have been greatly exaggerated. They were over-deployed when oil was cheap and the economy was good and we are just on the backside of the "50 seat bubble", if you want to call it that. They still have a role, though that role is diminishing somewhat (right sizing is more accurate). But I am reasonably confident that the 50 seat jet won't disappear entirely in my lifetime.