Hundred-seater aircraft are initially at a disadvantage economically compared to larger aircraft. This was stated by Alexander Dolotovsky, Deputy Managing Director of PJSC Yakovlev — Director of the Regional Aircraft branch.
He drew attention to an important factor — the limitation of annual flight hours by the operation model. Hundred-seater aircraft typically fly shorter routes, which inherently reduces the total annual flight hours.
The thing is, in addition to flight time, there is also the time the aircraft spends on the ground preparing for flight. And it is the same for flights of any duration and amounts to at least one and a half hours of additional working time for the crew and the aircraft.
Dolotovsky continued that working on a one-and-a-half-hour flight and performing four flights a day, the aircraft will spend 6 hours in the sky, but its working time will be more than 10. The same aircraft flying a three-hour flight will fly 12 hours in four flights with 16 hours of working time.
It turns out that for short flights, almost twice as much crew cost is required per flight hour. The operating time of aircraft systems in cycles per flight hour is also significantly higher, which negatively affects the cost of maintaining airworthiness. The economics of a flight in terms of the cost of transporting a seat per kilometer is approximately 1.5 times worse for hundred-seater aircraft than for 180-190-seater aircraft.
The Director of the Regional Aircraft branch noted that, seemingly, small aircraft should completely leave the market, but there is one "but" associated with the characteristics of the actual passenger flow.
Let's say the flow on the route is limited to a hundred people per day. If you put a 180-190-seater aircraft on it with a low standard cost per seat/kilometer, the picture changes dramatically. The absolute cost of the flight depends little on the load (for a hundred-seater, it is about half as low). Accordingly, with half the load, a large aircraft will be worse than the Superjet by at least 50% in terms of cost per seat/kilometer.
Dolotovsky explained that this is why the idea of completely abandoning hundred-seater aircraft and producing exclusively large narrow-body and wide-body aircraft was never realized.
It should be noted that in 2026, the main Russian-made aircraft for ~100 seats is the SJ-100 (import-substituted version of the Superjet 100), which has a capacity of about 98–103 passengers.
Read more on the topic:
- Rostec Announces the Production Date of 12 New Superjets and the Completion of MS-21 Certification
- What will prevent the SJ-100 from stalling?: A representative of PJSC Yakovlev gave an answer
- The number of SJ-100s "ours to the last screw" has reached 24 aircraft
