Fuel Burns CRJ vs 737-700

[rajflyboy]

Not really the answer to your original question, but along the same lines:

I fly the 170/175, and have spent a lot of time jumpseating on the A319/320. Comparing the two aircraft, I would say that the 170/175 is half the weight (max gross), carries half the passengers, and burns pretty much exactly half the fuel. So, the Embraer is not necessarily more efficient, but it brings mainline efficiency to smaller aircraft. The big perk for the Embraer is that (labor aside, of course) you can get similar cost per mile while flying full, as opposed to flying with empty seats. The ability to fly with fewer open seats is what makes all regional jets more attractive in today's environment. Or at least last year's market.

If you want specific burn numbers, I say I see fuel flows of 1700-1850 lbs/hr/eng flying at high weights, FL300-380, at .78M. If we pull back to .74M, the fuel flows drop about 100 lbs/hr/eng. That is flying 86 people around. In the mid-20's for cruise altitude, fuel flows go up to 2000-2100 lbs/hr/eng while flying at 300 kts or so.

A lot of our 170/175 flying at Republic is east coast hops of short duration. On those flights we rarely get up to an efficient altitude. I have had ATC stop us regularly at 17000 for an hour long flight when heading into PHL. No one is efficient at those altitudes unless you are beating the air into submission with a pair of props.

I don't know what 737s and A320s burn at idle on the ground, but it is a relevant comparison for east coast flying, as we can easily spend 1.5-2 hours taxiing before a flight of equal duration. The 170/175 burns about 600 lbs/hr/eng at idle on the ground. Single engine taxi is the norm. If you also have the APU running, it is an additional 300 lbs/hr.

For a benchmark, on a PHL-IAH leg the 170/175 will burn about 11000 lbs total with average headwinds.

Hope this helps. I'll try to remember to post some Specific Range numbers, which would make for a more accurate comparison.

Thanks for the info guys.

 

[sstearns2]

The CRJ-200 is burning about 2500 lbs/hr at .74 up above FL300.

Another thing to concider is how much revenue does each seat produce. If you replace a full 150 seat airplane with a full 50 seat airplane and you do the marketing/pricing right you can cherry pick the 50 highest paying passengers off the 150 seat airplane and end up getting a lot more revenue per seat with the 50 seater. Basically with the smaller airplane you can forget about the $99 3 month advance purchase people and focus on the $399 1 week and the $599 1 day advance purchase people. That's why the RJs work even though the seat mile costs are higher.

Scott

 

[TZtoSWA]

The CRJ-200 is burning about 2500 lbs/hr at .74 up above FL300.

Another thing to concider is how much revenue does each seat produce. If you replace a full 150 seat airplane with a full 50 seat airplane and you do the marketing/pricing right you can cherry pick the 50 highest paying passengers off the 150 seat airplane and end up getting a lot more revenue per seat with the 50 seater. Basically with the smaller airplane you can forget about the $99 3 month advance purchase people and focus on the $399 1 week and the $599 1 day advance purchase people. That's why the RJs work even though the seat mile costs are higher.

Scott

Those 50 seaters are really working out well right now. Just ask Boyd.

 

[n757st]

Those 50 seaters are really working out well right now. Just ask Boyd.

There is a need for 50 seaters, just not nearly as many as there are.

 

[scootertrash]

I think the problem with the 50 seat planes is that with the leg lengths that they are being used on, you cannot take 50 people and their bags and if needed any extra fuel if their is any amount of weather to deal with!

With the 737 or other larger plane you might not have a full load of people but you could have cargo or mail that will make up that difference and be a lot more flexible.

The 50 seat plane is being used beyond its capabilities and passenger comfort in a lot of markets just so the airlines can offer frequency. I would rather have fewer flights a day and a more capable airplane.

 

[skid]

The CRJ-200 is burning about 2500 lbs/hr at .74 up above FL300.


Scott

That thing can get above 300? I have not flown one but riding up front the thing looks like a real dog when full. The last time I was in one we had to stop at 280 cause we were climbing so slow!

 

[rajflyboy]

The CRJ-200 is burning about 2500 lbs/hr at .74 up above FL300.

Another thing to concider is how much revenue does each seat produce. If you replace a full 150 seat airplane with a full 50 seat airplane and you do the marketing/pricing right you can cherry pick the 50 highest paying passengers off the 150 seat airplane and end up getting a lot more revenue per seat with the 50 seater. Basically with the smaller airplane you can forget about the $99 3 month advance purchase people and focus on the $399 1 week and the $599 1 day advance purchase people. That's why the RJs work even though the seat mile costs are higher.

Scott

Interesting idea's here.

We have that other thing to worry about though. "Airspace"

3 "50" Seat jets doing what 1 Boeing can do. The RJ clogging up the ATC system.

 

[rajflyboy]

CRJ Cruise at 30,000 feet = 2500 Pounds per hour

737-700 Cruise at 30,000 = 4500 Pounds per hour

It certainly looks as if the 737 is more efficient if both planes are full of people


Throw in Domestic Airspace Issues..... Boeing looks pretty good!

 

[BigPappa]

This should give you a good idea, even though the reports are a little outdated (2007).

Here are the links found on the net:


http://www.aviationnow.com/media/excel/avd_11_14_2007_1.xls

[URL]http://www.aviationnow.com/media/excel/avd_08_22_2007_1.xls[/URL]

http://www.aviationnow.com/media/excel/avd_08_15_2007_1.xls

http://www.aviationnow.com/media/excel/avd_08_13_2007_1.xls

http://www.aviationnow.com/media/excel/avd_09_06_2007_1.xls

http://www.aviationnow.com/media/excel/avd_08_27_2007_1.xls

 

[PreContact]

USA Today did a story on this very topic a couple of months ago. Couldn't get table at end of article to properly format but the numbers are clear. And this was based on $3.15/gallon.
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-05-21-regional-jets-cutbacks_n.htm

Airlines cut use of regional jets as fuel costs soar
By Dan Reed, USA TODAY
Record jet-fuel prices are reversing one of the biggest trends in domestic air travel over the last 15 years, and that could leave some smaller cities with fewer daily flights — or none at all.
In the past eight years, hundreds of small regional jets with 50 or fewer seats, called RJs, replaced both smaller turboprops and bigger commercial jets on dozens of routes between big hubs and midsize airports.

The RJs were never huge profit makers in the best of times. Rather, they were promoted as economical substitutes for 110- to 140-seat jetliners on thin-demand routes because their ownership and operating costs were lower per mile flown. They were also marketed as more consumer-friendly than smaller, noisier, slower and less comfortable turboprop planes. Airlines invested heavily in them starting in the late 1990s, primarily to feed more travelers from small markets into their hubs and onto their more profitable mainline flights.
As a result, one in four commercial takeoffs today is made by a 50-seat or smaller RJ.

But the number of small RJs in service has begun to drop as the big airlines under whose brands most regional flights are sold recoil from jet-fuel spot market prices now averaging $3.79 a gallon.
There were 1,333 such planes flying in the USA on April 1, down from the peak of more than 1,350 a year ago, OAGback Aviation Solutions says. By Christmas, that number will be near 1,200, if all the service cutbacks announced and recently hinted at are implemented.

Cutbacks planned for fall
An announcement by Delta Air Lines this spring indicates how business judgment has turned against the RJs. Delta, which early this decade committed itself to operating the biggest fleet of them in the nation through its regional affiliates Comair and ASA, said it will dump 70 of those planes out of its Delta Connection operation by fall.
On Wednesday, American said it will remove from service 35 to 40 RJs flown by its regional airline affiliates. That's on top of grounding 40 to 45 of its mainline jets and a small number of turboprop regional airliners.

Continued high oil prices are likely to cause the nation's fleet of RJs to shrink faster and further than even the harshest critics of RJs originally anticipated.
"We think now that something like 835 RJs now in service in the USA will come out by 2013," says consultant Michael Boyd of the Boyd Group in Evergreen, Colo.

That would represent a 60% shrinkage of the USA's fleet of 50-seat and smaller RJs in just six years.
Boyd, an early proponent of RJs in the early 1990s, was one of the first to sound the alarm, in 1999, about the coming RJ glut. By 2007, with oil threatening $70 a barrel, he was predicting that about 1,200 RJs with 50 or fewer seats would be removed from service worldwide by 2018. That's out of a total of nearly 2,300 in service.

Now, with oil selling above $130 a barrel, Boyd estimates 1,700 of them will be gone by 2013.
"Airlines don't throw these big pieces of aluminum across the sky because it's fun," he says. "If the cost of operating a plane exceeds the revenue that can be put on board that plane, as it does now with the small RJ, it should be parked."
Parking 50-seat and smaller RJs will mean less service for many of the smaller cities where they are the primary or only vehicles of commercial air transport. Carriers have begun the gradual process of shaving markets back from five to seven flights a day to four or five, or even fewer.

"You can probably fly a 70-seater for very close to what you can fly a 50-seater," says Kit Darby, president of Air Inc., an aviation jobs market consulting firm. "What you'll likely see more of is … fewer flights each day on 70-seaters instead of 50-seaters. That way, they can capture the passenger demand that is there, but at overall lower operating costs."

In some of the thinnest-demand markets, fewer 50-seaters likely will mean losing service altogether. Currently, more than half of the 50-seaters fly on routes with 75 or fewer total passengers a day. If airlines raised fares enough to cover their operating costs in such markets, consumer demand could fall below the threshold for just one or two flights a day in such markets.

Aircraft manufacturing analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group says that in smaller cities where a larger airport is within two to three hours by car, operating fewer flights a day — either on 50- or 70-seat RJs — could become economically unsupportable as business travelers and leisure fliers opt to make relatively short drives to save time or money.
He also expects regional airlines to eliminate most, perhaps all, of their longer "hub bypass" flying in RJs.
Example: American Eagle said this month it will drop flights between Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport and Raleigh/Durham, N.C. That route bypasses American's Dallas/Fort Worth and Chicago O'Hare hubs and was designed to connect manufacturers' representatives from North Carolina with buyers at Wal-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville. Such routes are economic lost causes today.

An expected reversal
The two dominant makers of 50-seat and smaller RJs foresaw the problem early this decade.
Even as the jetmakers were delivering hundreds of 50-seat RJs, big airlines were shrinking their costs by shifting their most marginal flying to regional affiliates. The manufacturers figured that at some point, market growth would force the carriers to use larger planes on many of those routes and demand for more 50-seaters would slow to a trickle. So Canada's Bombardier and Brazil's Embraer decided to stop making 50-seaters for the U.S. market even before fuel began its climb.

Both now focus on producing larger aircraft seating 70 to 100 passengers. Embraer's 70-seat E-170 and larger models feature a wide fuselage cross section that comes close to the fuselage size of so-called mainline narrow-bodies such as the Boeing 737 and MD-80 and the Airbus A320 family of planes. Bombardier recently began offering a larger family of planes that will compete with the 110- to 140-seat class now dominated by the 737 and A320.
Contributing: Barbara De Lollis

HIGH FUEL PRICES HURT REGIONAL JETS' PROFITABILITY
The trend: Record jet-fuel prices are making 50-seat regional jets unprofitable to fly, says aviation consultant Michael Roach, of Roach & Sbarra. An online analyzer tool his firm developed helps show why.

Analysis: In this example, Roach compared ExpressJet's costs of flying a 50-seat regional jet, an Embraer ERJ-145, against Continental Airlines' costs of flying a Boeing 737-500 with the same number of passengers and on the same 596-mile route. ExpressJet does much of its flying as Continental Express. Roach based his analysis on both airlines' reported third-quarter costs per available seat mile—what they spent to fly one seat one mile—and ExpressJet's average passenger load and its average flight length in the third quarter. ExpressJet's third-quarter cost represents the portion of its fuel bill it paid, excluding a subsidy from Continental. For this analysis, the airlines were assumed to pay the same prices for fuel currently.

Conclusion: The 737's total operating costs — calculated by multiplying cost per seat mile times number of seats times distance flown — remain significantly higher than the ERJ’s, and it would lose money on such routes. The ERJ's costs per seat mile now exceed those of the larger Boeing jet, which potentially might carry more passengers and generate more revenue per flight. At fuel prices of $3.15 a gallon, the ERJ's total operating cost increases 39% in this example, making it, too, a money-loser on such routes.

Period Airline Plane Seats Filled seats Fuel price (gallons)Distance (miles)Cost/available seat mile (cents)Total flight cost
Q3 2007 Express Jet ERJ-145 5038 $1.06596 14.95 $4,455
Q3 2007 Continental B737-500 11438 $2.13596 15.95 $10,837
Now Express Jet ERJ-145 5038 $3.15596 20.74 $6,181
Now Continental B737-500 11438 $3.15596 18.03 $12,250

Note: Current costs in this analysis are based on a higher average cost of fuel $3.15 a gallon, a price somewhat below recent spot market prices. Source: Roach & Sbarra Unit Cost Analyzer