Over the last few months the FWA F100's have been called in to replace the Airlink 146's many times.
AA is trying to reduce the number of aircraft types they have in the fleet, at one stage they had 14 types, the current plan is to reduce to 7 types.
The F100 is very popular with passengers, with the AA aircraft entering the market the price of the F100 will drop again, which means it's a good time for Alliance to purchase more.
The F100 could go head to head with the B717 on many routes and from a passengers point of view they couldn't tell that one aircraft is worth $25-30m US and the other $8m US, but the bean counters could.
When FWA purchsed the F100's they also purchased another F100 that had been damaged and used it for spares. They could so the same again, once again reducing the operating costs.
Just to finish off, yesterday at Rocky Qantaslink had a aircraft go US (20-30 pax booked to BNE). I believe Alliance made an offer to fly them back to BNE on the F100, but Qantas said no way and the passengers were stuck at Rocky for a few hours. So much for Qantas looking after their passengers, maybe they were affraid the pasengers would enjoy the F100 to much
