Quote:
Tuboprops are complicated, they vibrate, they do not fly high enough or fast enough, they suffer from icing problems.
To get Turboprops to vibrate less like the Q400 makes them even more complicated.
They cost nearly as much to manufacture as jet aircraft and especially in Europe are only economical, when virtualy given away by desperate manufacturers who cannot sell aircraft
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Oh really?!
So turboprops are "complicated" eh ? Compared to what - a turbojet !!!??? You must surely be talking about just the engines themselves, right? (and your point is ??)
Well, you might consider most turboprop aircraft are free of the complexity of drop down oxy masks, and all the expensive and time consuming maintenance that goes with servicing that system. You might also consider that because they operate at lower altitudes (read: lower pressurisation differentials), they can be built lighter and more cheaply to begin with.
As for icing "problems", I know of no great disadvantage (economical or safety) of operating a turboprop in icing conditions compared to a turbojet. Of course you could forget to turn on the prop-heat or whatever, but then you could do something equally negligent in a turbojet.
The economic advantages of operating them are also quite undeniable. You will recall of course the turboprop vrs turbojet graph of "efficiency" over "distance" that must surely appear in just about every textbook of basic aeronautics ever published.
The fact that the Bombardier/Pratt and Whitney has, if anything, emphasised that difference by producing a turboprop that genuinely cruises at Mach 0.6/ 365kts and does so on only half the fuel required by a 146-100 over the same route surely only highlights those basic advantages.
These are FACTS. If Flybe bought Boeing, Airbus, CRJs, or even Embraer, to replace their turboprop fleet, they would, at the very least, be throwing away the economical advantage of paying pilots turboprop wages instead of jet wages. And that is to say nothing of the cabin crew advantages. You could say many things about the Flybe management, but naive they are not.
Just about all the early reliability issues of the Q400 have since been solved. Dispatch rates are very close to what they ought to be. Buying more of these aircraft is only going to improve matters(more spares, etc), and so reduce the operating costs even more. Flybe have been operating a mixed fleet long enough now for them to be able to have had a good hard look at the economics of it all. They have done the sums.
That is why they are buying more Q400 turboprops.
Last edited by Weary; 26th Apr 2003 at 05:08.