Features
Seating on regional airliners tends to be narrow and tight, and passengers typically are restricted from bringing on board carry-on items which would fit without difficulty in the overhead bins of larger aircraft. Often carry-on luggage is collected immediately prior to boarding and placed in the cargo hold, where it can be quickly retrieved by the ground staff while the passengers exit. While designed primarily for medium stage lengths, RJs may now be found supplementing major trunk routes alongside traditional larger jet aircraft. RJs allow airlines to open new "long, thin" routings with jet equipment which heretofore did not exist, such as Atlanta to Monterrey, Nuevo León. RJs have also meant a return of jet service to cities where full-size jet service had departed over a decade ago, such as Macon, Georgia, and Brownsville, Texas.
The notion that regional jet aircraft are less expensive (per seat mile) than traditional jets is a common misconception. On a seat-mile basis the RJ's cost is in fact higher. Regional jets are operated in the USA under a fee-per-departure payment structure. In this payment structure, a traditional airline contracts with a regional airline company on a per departure or per flight basis regardless of the number of passengers or the length of the flight. The traditional airline gets to keep all the revenue from the ticket sale and only pays the regional partner the agreed to amount. These contracts tend to be long term agreements, typically 10 year terms. The regional airline partner can then be relatively sure of the revenue side and only has to control cost in order to earn a modest return. However, these "regional airlines," now really "small jet providers" of contracted aircraft, have been squeezed by U.S. airline bankruptcies, fleet reductions and increasing operating costs. U.S. Legacy carriers have no longer been willing to shoulder burdensome losses from guaranteed-profit contracts with their small jet providers, and accordingly have played carrier against carrier in a low-bid game that has left hundreds of RJs idle and others potentially on their way to being laid up.
The idea that regional jets would provide point-to-point service and bypass the hub-and-spoke system may not be materializing as it was expected. As of January 2003, 90% of all regional jet flights in the United States had a hub or major airport at one end of that flight, and this number has been gradually increasing since 1995.
Read more about this topic: Regional Airliner
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