Originally Posted by
airbourne
I dont think there is one professional, slf, spotter or wanabee that would disagree that EI needs a 100 seater aircraft, why does EI management not see this?
Your implication is that it's a complete no-brainer for Aer Lingus to acquire 100-seaters and that the management is being wilfully obtuse in ignoring the massed ranks of spotterdom waving notebooks and chanting "what do we want? a hundred seats! when do we want them? NOW!"
First, let's be grateful that fleet choices don't get made based on what the spotters want to see!
I don't know the EI management team, but actually I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.
Right now there are routes which EI cannot serve optimally because the Airbuses are too big, so they have to choose either to operate them at lower-than-ideal frequency or not to operate them.
If they were to go out and buy half a dozen Embraers (for example), they'd need spare parts, training for the engineers, training for the pilots (would there be the expectation of the same salary for a 100-seat pilot as for an A320/321 pilot? I'm only asking...) etc. The one-off costs, and the overhead costs for a relatively small fleet, would be substantial. I'm not saying that there's no case to be made, I'm just saying it's likely they've calculated "with a small Embraer fleet, we could generate €x million extra revenue each year, but it would cost us €y million in new-fleet costs to do so" and the relationship between x and y is not as attractive as one might like.
In any case, if EI really wanted to try out 100-seater capacity without taking on all the associated fixed costs, they could just go and wet-lease half a dozen aircraft from CityJet, who must have a few spare...
C.