The CEO of Austrian Airlines does not believe in a rapid growth of Regional Aviation after this current crisis, due to the rapid withdrawal of many regional aircraft from airline fleets.
According to Alexis von Hoensbroech, this is a 'dying market', due to the standardization of the fleets of several airlines, eliminating some smaller planes, in favor of others or aircraft of the Airbus A320 or Boeing 737 family.
“In recent decades, we have seen that [flying] regional aircraft is a dying business, at least in Europe. Most successful network operators have divested most of their small regional aircraft. We think it's a trend you can't work against, because ticket prices have dropped so much that the unit costs for small aircraft are too big.”, said Alexis von Hoensbroech, CEO of Austrian Airlines.
Alexis used Austrian's own aircraft as an example in his statement on Routes Reconnected.
Before the pandemic, the company operated with 80 planes of different models. After the start of the pandemic, Austrian was forced to simplify the fleet, in the regional part the company retired its Dash-8 aircraft, and left only the Embraer E-Jets operating regional flights.
“When you downsize, you have the opportunity to do an accelerated fleet cleanup. (...) So we decided that we will get rid of our entire fleet of turboprops, our entire fleet of Airbus A319 planes and three of our older long haul aircraft that were almost 30 years old”said Alexis.
Now the largest aircraft available in the Austrian Airlines fleet after the Embraer E-Jet is the Airbus A320.
This logically reduces the space for companies to operate in regional aviation. Despite the optimism that regional aircraft will help in the market recovery, due to the adequacy of supply, since the beginning of the pandemic, Embraer has received few orders for new regional aircraft, the Dash 8 program has been frozen, and ATR delivered few planes throughout 2020.
Mitsubishi also froze the development of its SpaceJet line, and Russia saw many Sukhoi SSJ100 planes stay on the ground, while the bigger brothers took over the flights.
