Turboprops…

As Qantas and Air New Zealand have known for some time now, regional subsidiaries are a cost-efficient way to operate shorter routes and even the off-peak timetable of main trunk routes.

Passengers see turboprops as a positive in general, thanks to a good bit of greenwash about their environmental efficiencies (which are really fuel consumption benefits, so hardly altruistic corporate social responsibility on the part of the airlines) plus increases in frequencies and plummeting fares thanks to competition on lucrative regional resources hub routes.

Certainly, in terms of schedule and flight time, there’s a negligible difference between the Q400s, ATRs and jets more than twice their size. A lengthy taxiway tour of Sydney Airport would zero out the time difference at any rate.

Yet the onboard passenger experience on both turboprop types is firmly a step below mainline Boeing 737-800 flights sold alongside them.

In pure terms of what you find onboard, turboprops are much more low-cost carrier than they are full-service airline. Consider all-economy cabins, reduced extra-legroom upgrade option or premium frequent flyer product offerings, less comprehensive inflight catering, 29-30 inches of seat pitch, slimline (and often narrow) seats, no entertainment and not a lot of overhead bin space.

Within the Qantas Group the experience onboard a QantasLink Dash 8 is more similar to a Jetstar A320 than a Qantas 737.

That’s a frustration when the Q400s are increasingly deployed on mainline services alongside QF jets and often replacing them even on peak services, leading to a disappearance of premium cabin options.

Similarly, Virgin’s ongoing swap of the exceedingly comfortable Embraer E190 jets for ATRs on capital routes is a net loss for passengers, especially with the new business class onboard the jungle jets.

So Virgin Australia’s plans for Skywest will be keenly watched by Australians outside the Sydney- Melbourne-Brisbane triangle. Will “operated by Skywest” spread from the existing ATR routes? John Borghetti has made no bones in the recent past that Virgin Australia is not a low-cost airline and that Virgin Blue hadn’t been for some time. Skywest could be the money-saving, frequency-increasing option he is looking for.

Qantas, meanwhile, has much-rumoured (but more pie than sky) plans to use Airbus A319 jets to replace the QantasLink Boeing 717 fleet serving regional airports with decent runways.

That would leave the 717s (which are a relatively cheap asset with relatively high airframe cycles and fuel consumption) for the less-developed runways in the corporate charter and fly-in/fly-out markets.

An observer could conceive a situation where Qantas would decline to fund retraining of its Boeing 737 pilots for the 319s, offer existing Jetstar captains and first officers a transfer to a “more Qantas” subsidiary (thus reducing Jetstar’s costs yet keeping them below QF mainline) and recruit additional very inexpensive new pilots for first officer QantasLink jet positions.

The medium-term future, though, is likely to lie within the realms of larger, more comfortable turboprop aircraft rather than small jets. Despite the ongoing spruiking of Bombardier’s Cseries, Mitsubishi’s MRJ, Sukhoi’s Superjet and other 100-seaters, their economics have not yet appealed to Qantas or Virgin Australia.

easyJet has long been examining the options for big turboprops that would allow it to operate shorter routes more fuel-efficiently. Airbus keeps mulling short-range concept turboprop aircraft, while Bombardier and ATR have been developing various concepts for 90-seat options in the next generation of turboprops.

When selling the passenger experience of next-gen turboprops to people who aren’t getting any smaller, though, the current fuselage diameters and cabin widths remain a drawback.

Virgin Australia’s Merren McArthur can call them “highly fuel efficient and comfortable ATR-72 turboprop aircraft” all she likes, but the former truth does not prove the latter claim. Pinnacle seats are hardly the pinnacle of comfort.

Yet if the airframers boost the potential Bombardier Dash 9 and the ATR-102 to E-190 width (with correspondingly decent seat pitch, width and overhead storage), passengers will go out of their way to fly them and airlines will clamour for delivery slots.