Ex 'neville...':
'Any idea what the big picture is here??'
Broadening the base, tooling up to go after the feed-in/thinner end of the market/traffic.....??? as mentioned by 'B772'.
Extract here (my bolding):
The B717s provide us with [the] flexibility to service many segments of the domestic market, including regional routes, fly in fly out operations or more frequencies to capital cities. These are the kind of routes where travel demand is likely to recover first [from the COVID-19 pandemic]," he said.
Rgds
S28