Executives at the recent Regional Airline Association (RAA) annual assembly spent much of their time refuting claims that regional jets are causing problems within the air traffic system.
Wall Street may love the US regional airline industry, with margins averaging 12% in the fourth quarter compared with a negative 5% for the network carriers, but the industry faces the beginnings of public resistance to the regional jet, the very instrument of its success.
The consumer reaction comes as carriers use regional jets on longer and longer flights such as Washington to Florida or Indianapolis to Houston. Reports in publications such as The Wall Street Journal have pushed the story down throughout the media food chain. Spurring the media's chain reaction is a concerted "RJ bashing" campaign by labour unions, Regional Airline Association leaders said at their annual assembly in St Louis in late April.
RAA chairman Phil Trenary says that one FAA controller accepted a comment passed on by a mainline carrier that regional jets could not fly faster than Mach 0.74, although they can in reality match mainline jet performance of about Mach 0.82 if controllers request it. Trenary, the president of Pinnacle Airlines, a Northwest Airlink feeder, says that regional jets typically fly at that speed to conserve fuel, just as they typically fly at lower altitudes because they tend to fly shorter stage lengths.
This has led to a common accusation that regional jets are "clogging the airspace system", a claim that RAA president Debby McElroy suggests stems from various pilots' unions. The RAA plans an aggressive public response, McElroy says, and will mount a congressional awareness day. The association's board of directors has ordered a set of talking points to be drafted for use by members in public debate, media interviews, and importantly, in meetings with air traffic controllers in their workplaces. "The centres need to understand the capacity-enhancing activities of the regional jets and that regionals continue to be part of the solution and not the problem," Trenary says.
But regionals, which have almost 600 jets on order for delivery over the next three years, now account for about 43% of domestic air carrier operations and will have to win over more than just a few long-legged flyers, disgruntled air traffic controllers, and gullible journalists. The industry fears that the FAA will adopt demand management proposals as key elements of its airspace modernisation. Such schemes, which would ration air traffic services, would affect regionals disproportionately.
Consultant Doug Abbey of the Velocity Group says that the Department of Transportation's inspector general "is pretty clearly leaning toward recommending some form of a demand management system in certain markets" in a pending report. Recommendations by the IG, as inspector general Ken Mead is known, carry considerable weight in Congress.
A test case may come soon - Massport, the operator of Boston's Logan International airport, is working on a demand management or peak-pricing scheme to reduce congestion. FAA required the plan as part of its approval of Logan's long-delayed new runway. It would be the first such scheme in the USA. Massport tried a similar plan a decade ago, before regional airlines and general aviation successfully sued to block it.
Source: Airline Business
