 SN Brussels Airlines Avro RJ85 regional jet A regional jet (RJ) is a small short-range jet aircraft that is intended to fly passengers from smaller airports to larger ones, thereby "feeding" the larger hubs with passengers. The term feederliner is nearly synonymous, but allows also propeller aircraft.
History
In the early days of the hub-and-spoke model of airline operations in the immediate post-WWII era, a huge number of war-surplus DC-3's were available at very low costs. While there were a number of designs with much better operational costs, it wasn't until the mid to late 1950s when the DC-3 was becoming too expensive to maintain for passenger use that airlines started looking for newer models. Many of the DC-3's were passed on to freight operations, while a series of turboprop aircraft took over their market, the Vickers Viscount being one particularly successful example.
Beginning in the early 1960s, commercial air passengers began traveling on jet-powered aircraft with seating capacity from about 70 passengers to over 300. While these new jet-powered aircraft were a great stride forward and were popular in comparison to propellor aircraft, some of these jet aircraft were too large to be economical on shorter routes or on routes between smaller communities and the "mega-hubs" of the major carriers.
In the 1980s the earlier generation feederliners started to become too expensive to maintain in turn, necessitating the introduction of new generation of short-range aircraft. de Havilland Canada was in a particularly good position at this point, having just introduced a new aircraft with very low operational costs, the de Havilland Canada Dash 8, which soon took over a good portion of the market. Upset by this "upstart", a number of larger aviation firms decided to enter the market, and by the late 1980s the turboprop-powered feederliner market included the ATR 42 and ATR 72 from the Avion de Transport Régional consortium, Dornier 323, Jetstream 41 and Saab 340. This surplus of designs resulted in the market saturating in a very short time once the earlier 1950s designs were replaced. Today only the DASH-8 continues in production, albeit a much larger version.
Many air passengers dislike propeller aircraft because such airplanes are slower than jets, have significantly reduced comfort and power in most cases, and may lack a flight attendant and on-board lavatory. Yet airlines, conscious of their need to survive economically and provide a financial return to their stockholders, promoted the use of small propellor commuter planes on routes extending to smaller cities. What was needed was a small jet aircraft to fill the niche.
The first widely successful jet feederliner design was the Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) (CL 600) in the early 1990s, which soon started replacing almost all other designs for new purchases. The CRJ's range is enough to fill mid-range routes as well, routes previously served by larger aircraft such as the Boeing 737 and DC-9. The aircraft are so inexpensive to operate that they are increasingly being used for direct airport-to-airport flights, bypassing the whole hub-and-spoke design entirely, and causing a minor revolution in airline operations.
As with the 1970s/'80s turboprops, the CRJ soon found itself with competition. To date the main competition has been the Embraer EMB-145, and the two designs have since been in hot competition, with some highly charged political wrangling as a result. Fairchild Dornier introduced the 328JET to compete, but went bankrupt soon afterwards. A fourth design from a consortium of Sukhoi, Ilyushin, and Boeing never materialized, and a Fokker-ERNO design ended when Fokker went bankrupt before the design was finalized. It appears that the "oversupply" situation of the '80s will not occur, leaving the market to be divided up by Canadair and Embraer.
Smaller jetliners have been a part of the market since the early days of jet airliners. The Sud Caravelle would today be placed in the "small" category due to size alone. Other examples include the 40-seat YAK 40 and mid-sized BAe 146 and Fokker 100. The key difference between these designs and current regional jets is operational costs, the new designs cost significantly less to operate, making them suitable for feederliner duty, as opposed to simply being "short range airliners" that operate the main-haul routes as with larger designs.
As the popularity of regional jets continues to grow with airlines, larger variants of these aircraft can be expected. These larger variants will blur the line between RJ's and traditional "full-size" jet aircraft. As an example, the original DC-9 jet aircraft were designed to seat approximately 75 passengers. RJ's have a ready market with airlines who appreciate their lower acquisition and operating costs.
Features
Feederliners are typically flown by the regional airline offshoots of the larger international airlines. Since the majority of the price of a ticket is in the longer-range portions of the flight, regional jets need to be as cost-effective as possible. An aircraft's lifetime cost is a combination of three factors, the purchase price, maintenance costs, and operational costs such as fuel use. If the regional jet's ticket between two smaller airports costs even close to that between two major hubs, the passengers will simply drive instead.
Seating on RJ's 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. While designed primarily as feeder aircraft, these RJ's may now be found flying major trunk routes alongside traditional larger jet aircraft on routings including Dallas/Ft. Worth to Oakland, CA; Atlanta to Houston; and Cleveland to Newark. RJ's allow airlines to open new "long, thin" routings with jet equipment which heretofore did not exist, such as Atlanta to Monterrey, Mexico. RJ's have also meant a return to jet service to cities where full-size jets had departed over a decade ago, such as Macon, Georgia.
The fact that regional aircraft are less expensive than traditional jets is a common misconception. The reason that regional jets provide an economic benefit to traditional airlines comes from the fee-per-departure payment structure under which these aricraft are operated. In this payment structure, a traditional large airline pays a regional airline on a per departure or per flight basis regardless of the number of passengers or the length of the flight. The idea that regional jets provide point-to-point service and bypass the hub-and-spoke system is also a misconception. 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 graduatly increasing since 1995.
List of regional airliners
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