appropriate aircraft sizes

[brique]

This is for debate rather than a request, tho it may lead to one later.

We hear much, and  rightly so, about the use of small aircraft to frequency-spam routes. This has led to demands to re-model the pax demand/ supply routines to counter such use of inappropriate aircraft. Currently this seems to be heading in the area of placing a minimum limit on aircraft size related to demand on the route and then penalising smaller aircraft.

But what of the other side of this coin? Currently, I can see two routes as follows :

demand 50px distance 73nm; aircraft used: 133 seat

demand 60px; distance 197nm;  aircraft used : 113 seat

Okay, these probably are done to fill a gap in the daily schedules and mop up a little demand and this is no criticism of the airlines involved: but if we are going to demand 'realistic' aircraft allocation, then its plain these routes would suit smaller aircraft, particularily the first mentioned, but there is no additional penalty for running a excessively large aircraft on it (250% supply) against a 50-seater : whereas the reverse, running a 50-seater against a 130-seater on a higher-demand route would bring a penalty under the new system being planned.

There is an argument that an airline can fill odd-corners of its schedules with such routes and, as the running costs are higher for over-large a/c so that's the penalty : I would then say, small domestic/regional airlines will be forced to run larger types and incur high commonality costs for that extra fleet, often to service a handful of routes, rather than utilise their existing fleet types : so, surely, it would then only be fair to force airlines to run an appropriate fleet to service smaller routes as well as the larger ones?

[Sami]

Without going into too much detail, on my mobile browser, I will just say that the examples you gave are wrong and exaggerated. It will not be not that extreme.....