Draginass said:
For the regional guys, you better realize that your fate is tied to the the major airline and the economics of standalone, high cost RJs is being subsidized by the major with FFD schemes. How come the airlines that were making money until recently, DON'T have RJs. Look at FlyI flying RJs as standalone. Dead and buried.
You RJ guys aren't really working for "airlines." You're working for a "small jet vendor," selling outsourced services to a real airline.
But remember, SWA, JBlu, ValuTran- they are all very different animals than DAL, AA, CAL, UAL, etc. They are all expanded niche market operations. Their success has hinged on cherry-picking routes for their rather specific operations to maximize profitability. They are starting to run out of expansion options (if they are going to maintain the same level of profitability on each) because there just arent that many routes out there that can be run the way that they do and still make money.
The "Mainline" carriers have large (or expanding), national and international (overseas, not just N America) networks, and they decided a while back that they needed to feed them. Are RJs profitable for them? Who knows, there are so many ways to jigger the credits and debits that there may be no objective way to say. But they need feed for their networks and without it, they would have to "right-size" themselves into LCCs. They could try to feed with MD88s, DC9s and 732s exclusively, keeping it all in house, but would that work any better (other than fighting the RJ scourge that has afflicted the industry)? It seems that any of these options would shrink the mainline carriers and be a detriment to mainline pilot lists.
All my OPINION, but it seems that RJs are a necessary part of the industry.
No matter what happens in the industry, someone
WILL get screwed. Life is not fair, and business most certainly is not. The airline business is irrational, and the publics perception of airline travel is irrational and unrealistic, but thats the way it is.