Regional jets will be ‘tactical weapon’ in airline recovery: CityJet chief

Regional jets are likely to become an important tool for some of Europe’s mainline carriers as the recovery from the Covid-19 crisis begins, according CityJet CE Pat Byrne. “Airlines will be anxious to preserve slots,” he said Wednesday. “They will be anxious to protect market position [and] they will be anxious to defend routes they previously had… The tactical weapon for doing that is the regional jet.” Aircraft the size of the Irish wet-lease operator’s Bombardier CRJ900s will therefore “be most in demand, soonest”, Byrne believes, because “loads will be light” and airlines will have a “very critical eye” on trip costs. With no aircraft of that gauge “in their armoury”, mainline operators will do “the obvious thing” and “wet-lease it in”, he states, rather than uneconomically deploying larger types from their own fleets. In support of this view, Byrne cites North America, where CRJ900s, CRJ700s and Embraer 175s are “the aircraft that are back in the air first”. CityJet has spare wet-lease capacity after four of the carrier’s five contracts with airlines “literally evaporated” last year during the first wave of the pandemic, Byrne recalls, as customers “invoked force majeure” amid a near-total collapse in air travel. Almost overnight, Air France, Aer Lingus, Brussels Airlines and Lufthansa withdrew their business with the operator. “SAS did not, thank God, because we recognised that we had a mutual dependency on each other, because we were responsible for an enormous proportion of their regional network,” says Byrne. But with a drastically reduced customer base, CityJet emerged from an Irish Examinership process in August, “a hell of a lot lighter than we were”.<br/>