This week’s Flight Friday looks at the U.S. legacy carrier “feeder” network.
During the very early stages of the COVID pandemic, the regional carriers were quite active in the summer months of 2020, as the U.S. population were still allowed to travel domestically.
Regional carrier utilization really hit a peak in the U.S. during summer 2021, again due to an uptick in travel demand as part of the “revenge travel” period.
However, since those peak times, feeder utilization dropped a little and began to plateau. U.S. carriers started to change how they use their feeder networks.
American Airlines has really gone all-in with its feeder network—branded as “American Eagle”—having recently announced orders for 90 Embraer E175s, which will be operated by Envoy Air. Delta Air Lines, on the other hand, has removed all its CRJ200’s from the “Delta Connection” fleet and shifting some of that work onto the mainline carrier, using the Airbus A220s. United Airlines, using its “United Express” brand, announced pre-COVID that it would convert its CRJ700s into CRJ550s, creating a 50-seat aircraft with premium seating, to replace the 50-seat CRJ200 without.
This new plateau seems to have become the new norm—that will sit at around 80-90% equivalent 2019 utilization—as the newer, slightly larger aircraft come in to replace some of the older smaller aircraft, showing that the feeder networks are copying mainline fleets by upgauging flights to increase capacity, without drastically changing the schedule.
This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization tool.
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