Regional Jets

In my never-ending quest to recommend the best, most interesting articles that the Wall Street Journal has to offer, I call your attention to a front-page article in yesterday's paper ("Small Jets, More Trips Worsen Airport Delays" by Scott McCartney, p. A1). You probably have read about the fact that more commercial flights have been delayed this summer than for any period in at least several years. If you have flown, you have probably noticed that airports are crowded and flights are packed. You might also have noticed the rise of the regional jet.

At La Guardia, half of all flights now involve smaller planes, regional jets, and turboprops. It's the same at Chicago's O'Hare, which is spending billions to expand runways. At New Jersey's Newark Liberty and New York's John F. Kennedy, 40% of traffic involves smaller planes, according to Eclat Consulting in Reston, Va. Aircraft numbers tell the tale: U.S. airlines grounded a net 385 large planes from 2000 to 2006 -- but they added 1,029 regional jets -- says data firm Airline Monitor.

Air ridership has rebounded since the post-September 11 doldrums, with airline miles flown increasing 3.6% since 2002, and that's part of the reason things are so busy. But this increased ridership does not reflect the reality of the situation. Airlines have shifted a lot of those miles onto smaller-capacity regional jets, so the number of flights flown has increased much more steeply. More flights, more potential for delays, since the competition for airspace, runway slots, and gates increases in proportion to flights, not in proportion to the number of fliers those flights are carrying. Combine that with some days of very bad weather this year, the elimination in 2000 of the FAA's slotting system to limit the number of takeoffs and landings, and a creaky air traffic control system, and you have the potential for some outrageous delays.

The FAA wants airlines to have fewer regional jet flights and more flights with larger planes. The airlines don't want to do that for a number of reasons. First, regional jets cost less to operate because their flight crews earn less than flight crews on larger jets. Second, it allows airlines to have flights out of smaller airports to a larger number of destinations: there might not be enough passenger traffic to support 737 flights from, say, Birmingham to Houston, but there might well be enough to support Embraer 145 regional jet flights. Having more routes allow airlines to compete more effectively with one another, and they generally please the flying public. And, the airlines say, their reliance on regional jets need not cause the trouble that it does. One of the bottlenecks in the system that causes delays is traffic into and out of the Northeast. Airlines say that the FAA could do a better job of routing this traffic and that it systematically underutilizes the region's airports. JFK, for example, has four runways but typically only ever uses two at a time.

I am not qualified to offer an opinion about whether the airlines are right that the solution to the problem is the FAA doing a better job, but I can say that I like the trend toward regional jets. Say, for example, that you want to fly from Houston into Dallas Love (which is much more convenient to locations near downtown Dallas than DFW is). That route is Southwest's bread and butter; they dominate it. But the rise of regional jets allows other airlines to compete. Continental, for example, offers 10 daily regional jet flights from IAH to Love. If they had to use 737s, they would probably have to reduce that number to three or four, making them much less attractive to the fliers who shuttle between the two cities. And because of frequent flier miles, I prefer to fly on Continental. I believe that regional jets benefit me personally, even though I live near the hub of a major airline and could expect to have a wide array of direct flights regardless of whether regional jets were widely used or not. I imagine that regional jets would be even more attractive to me if I lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, Springfield, Illinois, or Spokane, Washington. The purpose of commercial airlines is to transport travelers, and regional jets allow them to do so more profitably and more conveniently than an all-big-jet fleet would.