The press releases were flying hard and fast with superlatives: a new premium-heavy CRJ regional jet from Bombardier, launched by United Airlines, offering a new standard for regional passenger experience?
Well, yes and no.
The CRJ550 is, in essence, a 50-seat down-rated 70-seater CRJ700, created only to meet the requirements of the “scope clause” in North America, with limited if any applications outside that unique context.
But it will have fewer seats, with fewer regular economy seats — and cupboards for hand luggage, fixing one of the key problems with the narrow tube of the CRJ family: gate-checking of bags.
READ: Brussels boosts business class.
Scope clauses are the key to the development of this downrated subtype. They are largely a factor in the US and Canada, limit the passenger count, weight and number of aircraft that a major airline can subcontract to a second carrier, usually under an “express” or “connection” brand.
With fewer crew on cheaper contracts and cheaper aircraft, this sort of outsourcing is attractive to airlines. From a passenger experience perspective, though, scope clauses have been a problem around the 50-seater market in particular, where the shorter CRJ200 is generally hated by passengers for its lack of room for legs, elbows and bags.
The CRJ550 will address each of those problems: legs by having more extra legroom seating (available for purchase, of course), elbows by adding more first-class seating (ditto), and bags by adding “four storage closets”.
These, according to United, provide customers ample room to store their carry-on bags and making the CRJ 550 “the only regional jet in the skies where customers will not need to routinely gate check their bags”.
(This gate check claim is only true if one does not count the Embraer E-Jet family of aircraft, with its wider frame and bigger bins, as a regional jet.)
United will operate the aircraft with ten recliner seats in the domestic first class 1-2 configuration (the fourth row will contain one single seat), twenty extra-legroom Economy Plus seats, and twenty regular economy seats.
That’s twenty fewer than the 70-seater CRJ 700 that uses the same airframe, offering six first class, 16 Economy Plus and 48 regular economy seats.
Bombardier and United seem to have agreed on a line for messaging on space: “more overall legroom per seat than any other 50-seat aircraft flown by any U.S. carrier”.
Of course, you get that extra space by more than halving the number of regular economy seats and boosting the number of first class and extra-legroom seats.
With Bombardier’s Atmosphère cabin — which has larger bins — available for new CRJ builds, however, it’s interesting to note that there’s no mention of that improvement around the CRJ550.
And, although the financial details are scant, it would seem that converting existing aircraft that are in oversupply would be a very reasonably priced approach to increasing the amount of lucrative premium seating on routes connecting to the airline’s hubs at Chicago and Newark, where the CRJ550 will début.
There’s also another aspect to the 50-seater nature of this jet: it only requires one flight attendant, which might well pose problems for delivering the premium passenger experience United is doubling down on.
The CRJ550 comes alongside a series of commitments for more and better seating in first/business class (and premium economy), but it’s hard to see how a single cabin crew member can provide quality service to all ten first-class passengers as well as taking care of the other forty people on board.
One imagines that’s why United will offer “a self-serve beverage and snack station” at doors one, although the proof will be in the (probably shelf-stable) pudding.
The prospect of first-class passengers hopping up and down to refill their glasses or raid the snack basket in the narrow confines of a CRJ cabin on a short connecting flight doesn’t strike me as particularly premium, or particularly practical.
If the new aircraft designation is mostly a mix of inside baseball and hype, it’s not surprising, or indeed the first time this has happened.
Yet overall, it is positive to see Bombardier, having passed the C Series (now the Airbus A220) small airliner to Airbus, and in the process of selling the Dash 8 programme to Viking, focussing on its one remaining commercial aircraft, the CRJ.
