Regional airline

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Flight West was a regional airline operating in Australia in the 1990s.

Regional airlines are a type of passenger airline service that provides services to smaller communities, frequently connecting to larger cities, and is generally intended to feed a larger airline with larger aircraft. The smaller communities are generally not able to support larger aircraft or do not generate enough passengers to warrant a high frequency of flights. This type of service is also called a commuter airline or feeder airline depending on the exact role.

Many large airlines, especially in North America, are associated with a regional airline that often uses the same company logo. These commuter airlines are sometimes subsidiaries of the major airline or fly under a code sharing agreement. Examples of these are Continental Express, American Eagle or Air Canada Jazz. In this role the airline is operated primarily to bring passengers to the major hubs, where they will connect for longer distance flights on the flagship carrier's larger aircraft. In this role they are often known as feeder airlines. The separate corporate structure allows the company to operate under different pay schedules, typically paying much less than their "flagship" owners.

Other regional airlines are formed to serve particular low-use routes and are often most important to small and isolated communities, for whom the airline is the only reasonable link to a larger town. An example of this is Peninsula Airways, which links the remote Aleutian Islands of Alaska to Anchorage. It is in this role that the term commuter airline is generally used.

Regional airlines began by operating propeller-driven aircraft over short routes, sometimes on flights of less than 100 miles in length. In the early days of commercial aviation few aircraft had ranges greater than this anyway, and airlines were often formed to serve the area in which they formed. That is, there was no strong distinction between a regional airline and any other airline. This changed with the introduction of long-range aircraft, which led to the development of the major flag carrier airlines, such as British Overseas Airways Corporation and Trans-Canada Airlines. As the flag carriers grew in importance with increasing long-range passenger traffic, the smaller airlines found a niche flying passengers over short hops to the flag carrier's airport. This arrangement was eventually formalized, forming the feeder airlines.

Through the 1960s and 70s, war surplus designs, notably the DC-3, were replaced by much more capable turboprop or jet-powered designs like the Fokker F27 Friendship or BAC One-Eleven. This extended the range of the regionals dramatically, causing a wave of consolodations between the now overlapping airlines. Many of the regional airlines in the United States and to a lesser extent in Europe and the United Kingdom eventually transitioned to regional jets, notably the Embraer or Canadair designs, in the 1990s. This brought the independent regional airlines into direct competition with the major airlines, forcing additional consolodation.

[edit] United States regional airlines

In the United States, regional airlines were an important building block of today's passenger air system. The U.S. Government encouraged the forming of regional airlines to provide feeder services from smaller communities to larger towns, where air passengers could connect to the major. The government also encouraged regional airline growth with the goal of making convenient air travel within the geographical reach of every American.

The first United States regional airline (then called a commuter airline) was Wright Airlines, founded by aviation legend Gerald Weller in Cleveland, Ohio. The airline was based at Cleveland's Burke Lakefront Airport, becoming the airport's first commercial carrier. though airlines had come and gone from Burke over the years, Wright Airlines endured, and by the time the airline declared bankruptcy in the late 1980s, it was appropriately the last commercial airline to leave Burke Lakefront Airport. (Cleveland's commercial traffic in has since been consolidated at the city's larger Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, itself a major part of aviation history.)

Since Wright Airlines, regional airlines have become an integral part of the worldwide air transport system.

Some examples of the original regional airlines sanctioned by the Civil Aeronautics Board in the 1940s and 1950s include:

Of the airlines listed above, none survives today. Some airlines use these names today; however, they are not direct the corporate successors to the original airlines.

[edit] European regional airlines

European regional airlines serve the intra-continental sector in Europe. They provide essential services for many of the continent's peripheral regions, connect provincial cities with both major airports and with other provincial cities, avoiding the need for passengers to make transfers at larger airports.

Some of Europe's regional airlines are subsidiaries of national air carriers, though there remains a strong entrepreneurial sector of independents. They are based on a variety of business models, ranging from the traditional full service airline to low cost carriers. Innovations are being tried by some airlines including one that is structured as a membership club that must be joined before being allowed to fly.

Some examples of European regional airlines include: