Michael Boyd vs. 50 seat RJs

[cheapgreek]

I wonder if ten years down the road, there's gonna be a huge glut of 70-76 seaters that need to be rapidly dumped in the desert. It kind of seems that airlines are about to simply repeat the same mistake with bigger RJs.

No, I don't so. Remember, the 50 seat RJ was a new type of airliner and never before was a jet produced with such low seating capacity. In fact the first models by Embraer and Canadair were based on older biz jets. The newer crop or RJ's such as the e-170, 175, 190, 195 and the models coming on line from Canadair, Mitsubishi, and a few others are designed as RJ's except for the larger CRJ-700, 900, and 1000.
Fuel burn on the larger models is such that they have better economics and are better able to weather the spikes in jet fuel, at least so far.