This is AMR they will spend a buck to save a penny. As one of the guys getting displaced I hope it fails miserably but I can see some reasons why they chose to do it.
1. The 140s and 135s are getting returned. We have known this for almost a year. The LA base is made up of only 10 140s. The only city they share with other bases is SAF and the LA flight is just a turn. If a plane needs to get into the DFW system they either ferry it through ROW or GJT and swap with an RON or just ferry it direct to ABI like they did a couple of weeks ago. If it is known way in advance they might add a revenue flight to SAF but that has only happened a couple of times.
2. The performance numbers in LA suck. What really sucks is it is not the LA base bringing down the performance. The CRJs are breaking daily with no spare aircraft or crews, the CRJ crews are taking delays because they have 9 hour overnights in LA at a hotel that can take an hour to get to and an hour to get back with no scheduled shuttle service, and the CRJ FAs like to call in sick in the outstations (where they live) or get arrested like the FA in SAN last month cancelling a kick off flight.
3. LA is very senior. The top 25% of the captains have been here 20+ years, the junior captain is a April 2000 hire. The junior line holding flight attendent has been in LA over 10 years. This is going to cause a lot of these senior people to retire reducing the overall costs of the company.
4. California has laws the company doesn't like. Ever hear of California sick?
None of us have any ill will toward the Skywest or XJT guys it's not your fault it's our managements. Also talking with the Skywest guys in the hotel van the other morning they were saying the flying will go junior since it is -200s and they know how bad our ground personnel are. They actually make Menzies look good. Expect to wait 10 minutes every flight to get parked, air hooked up, gpu hooked up etc. The only descent station we have is SMF and that is because we use Horizon people.
The company had to use a good contractor. Many of the One World carriers have high standards for their codeshares. I believe that is one reason why the American Eagle brand will be put on the Skywest/XJT flights. I do consider XJT and Skywest to be among the best regionals and would have no problem putting my family on their aircraft.
I believe the ERJ is much more economical than the CRJ. The CRJ does hold 6 more people though. The ERJ can go to 370 at MGTOW while the CRJ can barely make it to 320 and needs to do a flaps 20 and APU ECS takeoff. We do go to 370 on RNO-LA and LA-TUS we used to do it on SJC-SNA and SAN.
I think if they really wanted to do it right they would have a Q400 operator flying out of LA to FAT, SAN, SBA, and MRY and have the CRJ do RNO SMF SJC TUS, PHX and SAN-SJC-SNA-SFO again.