Back in April 2023, American Airlines and Air Wisconsin launched a new partnership for regional flying. While this was supposed to be a five-year contract, it’s being discontinued early, after just two years. This has some implications for both companies.
Continue reading: American Airlines & Air Wisconsin Cut Ties: No More CRJ-200s?
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Need to knock ✊ on JetBlue’s door and see if they could pickup some regional work out of Florida, NYC, BOS, or San Juan. In a stretch, help rebuild LAX.
Surprised B6 has been silent about Silver which has its hubs in the same towns as B6 hubs.
Lost opportunity….
The steady elimination of 50 seat regional jets is “be careful what you wish for” for me. I hated CR2s and wanted them gone, but there are a lot of markets in the US that can’t support CR7s and E75s, so the removal of propellor planes and 50 seaters means that service to smaller airports has been greatly reduced
Replace Silver on intra-Florida routes, like Pensacola, Panama City, Tallahassee, Jacksonville to Tampa, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Miami
the economics of 50 passenger regional jets has significantly deteriorated post-covid.
Even though capacity cuts at some of the smaller mainline carriers has allowed regional jet staffing to improve, labor rates are still at historical highs.
single passenger regional jets just don't work to connect passengers to mainline carrier networks. No one wants to fly in them long enough for them to have local markets.
EAS markets shift the bill to the government where those markets can be found. The CRJ550 has slightly better economics due to being able to get some higher revenue but that concept is just a bandaid given that the jets are based on getting the last bit of life out of the CRJ700.
The real answer to what happens for AA is to see what they do with their schedules from ORD. I suspect AA has figured out that they can fly their existing mainline and large RJ fleet enough to offset the loss of the CR2s.
From what I have heard the routes will be flown by larger jets and only one route to O'Hare will be reduced from 4 fights a day to 3, others stay the same. Good news for the smaller regional airports
Schedules aren't reflecting this yet.
For example, trying to book ORD-AZO for April 5 (currently flown 2x/day by Air Wisconsin), the website still shows the two daily flights on CRJ200s, "operated by Air Wisconsin as American Eagle." Will be interesting to see the replacement as new schedules come online.
If true, then a real missed opportunity!! Considering Alaska has a regional (Horizon), this is a hamstringing to B6’s ability to grow into the big leagues and concentrate its footprint in key focus areas.
Speaking on behalf of us UA short-haul fliers out of ORD, we don't want you back, ZW. The trauma is still fresh.
And those of us who want B6 to die hideously are glad that the scope clause prevents this. Although I couldn't think of a better bit of complete pain than having a ZW/B6 team-up. No better way to drive away short-haulers than to have them fly on ZW.
For a big UA guy, you seem to forget all the SkyWest CRJ-200s out of ord for united
Evil. Unmitigated evil unleashed on the world by Neelzebub to flood innocent areas with the human cockroaches known as Noo Yawkers and Massholes. But the greatest evil was to put crappy-but-free wi-fi together with a slightly-gussied-up domestic First and called it Ain't to impress the low of brain power.
"Mint", of course. But the auto-correct is correct in this instance, as in "it Ain't special".
No, I haven't. Just flew on one Christmas week to Green Bay. But they've become exceptions instead of the rule it was when Air Whiskey operated for UA*.
@ORD Why don't you tell us how you really feel 😉
@Say What? B6 is the IATA code for JetBlue
EAS seems like a gigantic waste of resources, not unlike Amtrak's routes that service far-flung destinations. If a route can not at least break even (under basic economics) then it shouldn't exist.
145 is also a terrible plane. Ben preferring it is humorous as I’ll assume he hasn’t been on one in many moons.
There are quite a few parts of the country where EAS is necessary to serve places that can’t be accessed by road; in general, providing service to less dense areas costs a lot more than denser ones as more distance has to be traveled, but the only alternative is leaving people who live in these areas abandoned.
Although, if Americans were concerned solely with economic efficiency we wouldn’t build suburban single family homes either, since the cost of building roads, utilities, and other service is much higher per unit than it is for multifamily apartments and tax revenue is a lot lower. In Dallas 40% of city property tax revenue comes from the 3% of the land that is multi family apartments. You can absolutely make a case that owners of suburban single family homes should pay more (about 3x!) commensurate with the higher cost of their housing to the state/city they live in. But again, as a country we’ve decided people should get services wherever they live
So which routes to/from Chicago are going to see a loss of service (in terms of frequency and/or in its entirety)?
I suspect some of this is going to hit me, including on routes from Chicago to Wisconsin on AA flights operated by Air Wisconsin.
I've done analysis on this. Short answer: Basically none.
If you go forward to even the first week of March, Air Wisconsin is down to only being the sole service from ORD to AZO, BHM, BMI, DAY, FNT, LSE, MHK, MKE, SPI. Other markets like even ATW (home of Air Wisconsin and a crew base) have Envoy and Piedmont entering the mix. Some cities like GRB, EVV, ALO, MDT transitioning already to Piedmont on the E145. Piedmont has 30-something E145s parked at Marana, Arizona (ex American Eagle when American Eagle was an airline versus a brand, and later Envoy) and is bringing roughly 2 a month back online via modification and induction in Abilene. Envoy is also putting around a dozen E170s into service in the near term.
As of right now, Air Wisconsin is only flying about 60-70 round trips a day from ORD with 30 aircraft. So very low utilization. Slack in other fleets and the growth in PI/MQ (you can see based on schedules how more PI planes are entering the ORD network like flying CLT-EVV-ORD, or MDT-ORD turning over to Piedmont and MDT is a Piedmont crew base) basically makes this a non-event.
If anything, maybe there's short term a loss of a frequency in a place like MCI, OMA, CMH, or LIT where Air Wisconsin operates only one of a mix of other Eagle and mainline flights. Eagle at ORD is flat March vs September in the published schedule (at least in OAG as of yesterday).
I've looked and yes, between growth at Piedmont and Envoy with additional airframes and shifting of flights between carriers, AA already has it mapped out how ZW goes away with little effort.
25 of my 99 segments on UA last year (and 2 of 5 so far this year) were on Skywest CRJ-200s. (and another 20 were on Commutair E145s) Yeah 50-seaters are still there in big big way.
EAS isn't a gigantic anything. It's $390 million a year (last FY and that was an all-time high) and the direct economic return (before you even start applying multipliers) at least equals it.
Interesting. Maybe I will be the exception to the “basically none”.
For what it’s worth, I no longer see ORD-CWA/CWA-ORD in mid-May. Right now, it’s all Air Wisconsin, then it mixes to Air Wisconsin + Envoy, but then in or before mid-May it’s no longer scheduled for sale. It’s strange because only recently was the route set to go from two flights a day to three flights a day (at least some days of the week).
If its in the Y class I'd take ERJ145 over CR7/CR9 any day given the single seats and large aligned window, overhead space is not that of an issue as larger roller bags have to gate valet anyway
AA has CWA-ORD filed 3x daily through the end of the year in OAG.
Something is going on though oddly with the fares or they've made an error. ORD-CWA won't come up but I can search other connecting opportunities like CLT-CWA and it brings up like CLT-MSP-ORD-CWA.
AA is still making schedule changes for late March from what I've seen... maybe they're in the process of loading before tomorrow's update.
It’s not just the fares, it’s the schedules. AA pulled the flights from May ORD-CWA schedule. But it’s there of course before and later. Could still be doing a schedule adjustment as they figure out when and how much Envoy capacity they can move in, but for now it looks like a loss on service of sorts in at least May and that will hit me.
I don't think we can overlook what Delta did with Delta Connection. By forcing SkyWest to finally abandon the CRJ-200 and then reconfigurating the CRJ-700 to 50 seats with a first-class cabin, Delta created a great regional product. American may simply be responding to market demands. Nobody wants to fly on the CRJ-200. It's just not competitive. Especially with American losing business travel. They probably heard from their corporate clients or would-be corporate clients that the 200 had to go.
DL is only using the CR5 in EAS markets. The economics of that plane are still poor.
DL led the industry in replacing regional jets with mainline by getting rid of 50 seat single cabin aircraft.
UA has the same scope agreement as DL but chose not to get a small mainline aircraft that DL did - first the 717, then the A220-100 - so UA has to use the CR5 in order to come close to getting a comparable number of dual cabin regional jets.
AA has many more large RJs available. They didn't need to hold onto Air Wisconsin.
The CRJ will be relegated to charters and EAS where someone else pays the bill and the option is whether a city has service or not.
B6 is the airline code for JetBlue. Whenever you see one of the two-character airline codes that you don't recognize, just Google it (example: "NK airline").
I have to agree! I tend to have great luck flying UA out of ORD. However, any United Express flight featuring Air Wisconsin was a debacle. The worst. My guess is that they performed the same way for AA, though they are being too polite to call it out. Good Riddance.
They finished updating the schedules yesterday or maybe a little bit before, and with that they have since replaced the pulled Air Wisconsin flights to have their usual schedule for May too but now with Envoy or whatever.
First after this change, they had zero flights for those May dates, then a bit later they went to only having the 11 am CWA arrival loaded. Now they are back with the 3 daily arrivals into CWA.
Air Wisconsin is toast. You can't make money on EAS unless you are a bottom feeder like the defunct Colgan Air.