Interesting. Maybe I'm missing it, but the Mods apparently took down the post detailing Flair's July 2022 trans border loads, obtained from the US DoT site on line, free of charge. Is official US Government data not deemed reliable enough these days? The info was sourced from this data, the same data available to, and used by any decent airline analyst.
https://transtats.bts.gov/DL_SelectFiel ... 20Pn44vr45Given Flair's inability to avoid unions, their unit cost advantage over is basically a bit of "juniority" and "densification". I haven't bothered with an asl calculation for a year or so but it's probably between 950 and 1,100 miles. They'd have no meaningful cost differential to Swoop and, at best 10-12% over WS mainline, (WS has economy of scale), and more still over AC.
It's not a big enough delta to overcome the significant yield, (TRASM), differential and no where near the 10.3 cents an asm over a 335 mile asl WS had in its early days when AC and CP were between 850 and 1,000 miles pushing 13 cents a mile.
No one is using / planning on using E2's in a LCC/ULCC scenario. They are high cost machines that don't generate enough asm's to drive down unit costs. They require premium yields, which you don't get without frequency and, for lack of a better term, time. Premium yields take time to earn and unless there's a very deep source of cash available, Porter / any airline in this situation doesn't have a lot of time to make this work. See Roots Air as a classic example of how much $ you can blow through in a month.
That's why no LCC/ULCC operators have ordered them. They'll have better trip costs than a 737-800 / A32X operator, just as a Smart Car has better trip costs than a mini van, but where it matters is unit costs and they'll be at a significant disadvantage. They're driving unit costs down by longer stage lengths, but that's the oldest trick in the books. It'll fool neophytes, but not the people who know the industry well.
Using E2's vs 737-800's or Max aircraft is not going to turn out well, esp on low yield leisure routes where price is king. And without those leisure routes, it's going to be tough to figure out how to generate 11-12 hour a day compensatory utilization 51 weeks a year.
Porter made a huge mistake by ordering as many frames as they have. Perhaps they'll get lucky and pull a "Max Ward" with all the excess capacity they have as they are forced to pare down their rather grandiose expectations of accomplishing in 2 years what took others 10.
With that airframe, they'd be far better off taking advantage of its characteristics in smaller niche markets where they'd have a much greater liklihood of achieving a yield premium that they'll need to make the numbers work. That being said, that would amount to maybe 8 aircraft.
Then there's the Canadian passion of being "seduced by the mile". But Porter doesn't have any "burn" routes yet and when they add them, they'll operate with at least a 20-23% unit cost disadvantage, which isn't going to help. I can't see them being able to get a nice yield premium on flights to CUN, PUJ, MBJ, MCO, FLL, LAS, etc.
It's not going to be easy and committing to growth that would even make David Neeleman turn his head isn't going to help.
