Air transport in America is growing. But for decades, regional markets have declined. Could their fortunes be revived by the return of the turboprop?
Salem is the capital and second-largest city of the US state of Oregon, its metropolitan population more than 440,000.
As well as being the state’s seat of government, the city has strong healthcare, education and semiconductor sectors, and a thriving food and wine scene in the fertile Willamette Valley. Until late last year, Salem was served by Texas-based Avelo Airlines, whose business model is to fly to “primarily underserved communities.”
It was the only commercial airline serving the city, operating four Boeing 737 flights each week, two to Las Vegas and two to Hollywood Burbank Airport, near Los Angeles.
But citing high operating costs, Avelo axed west coast operations and refocused on the east coast and nearby international markets.
Now Salem-Willamette Valley Airport has no scheduled passenger flights and has lost Federal status as a commercial gateway, which includes security staff and equipment.
And it’s not alone.
Since 2000, some 800 regional or secondary air routes in America have closed or been downgraded, some, like Salem, more than once, and many in much smaller markets.
“Most US airports lack the passenger volume needed to sustain air service by network carriers,” explained the US Regional Airlines Association in its 2025 annual report.
“These smaller communities rely exclusively on regional airlines for their scheduled commercial air service.
“While network carriers directly served just 36% of our nation’s commercially served airports, regional carriers served 94.5% of these airports. Of the 635 US airports served by regional airlines, 430 rely on regional airlines exclusively.”
The RAA said regional airline services increased 25% between 2020 and 2024, though still below levels achieved in 2019, pre-pandemic.
But its 10-year data shows performance in nine key categories declined between 9% and 26% from 2015 to 2024, among them regional fleet flying hours (-26%), average daily departures (-25%), available seat miles (-18%), revenue passenger miles (-17%) and passengers enplaned (-15%).
Although total passenger traffic in America has exceeded 2019 levels, regional aviation has not “for two basic economic reasons,” said Bryan Terry, Managing Director US of the Alton Aviation Consultancy.
“First, the cost of operating traditional regional aircraft has risen materially since 2019, while smaller mainline aircraft have become more efficient as airlines introduced newer Airbus and Boeing variants during the same timeframe.
“Second, regional carriers’ labour costs, especially pilot pay, have increased sharply amid a tight labour market, with additional pressure from higher wages for other skilled roles like maintenance.
“Those forces have pushed major airlines to ‘up-gauge’ in many regional markets, shifting flying from regional jets to small mainline aircraft, and leaving some smaller communities, where service was already marginal at best, without enough economics to sustain prior frequency or service levels.
“Since 2019,” he added, “the in-service US-based regional jet and turboprop fleet has decreased 10.4%, while the mainline narrowbody fleet has increased 15.7%.”
For decades, there has been diminishing production of commuter planes or turboprop airliners to replace ageing, inefficient and unsustainable workhorses like the BAe Jetstream family, Embraer Bandeirante, Beechcraft 1900, Saab 340 and 2000, and De Havilland Dash 8-100, 200 and 300 models.
The last turboprop type made in America was the Lockheed Electra, between 1957 and 1961.
While new, low-or-no-emission products including the Deutsche Aircraft D328eco and Heart Aerospace ES30 are evolving, along with retrofit battery-electric or hydrogen-electric powertrains, none have been approved for entry into service and many have been delayed.
There is also the cost of providing charging and handling infrastructure for these aircraft at smaller airports, which are reluctant to commit without certainty of use and return on investment.
Today, said Grant Alport, Partner, Transportation and Services, for global consultancy Oliver Wyman, most smaller markets are served by contract carriers on behalf of major airlines under capacity purchase agreements, with a fraction of total services performed by independent airlines serving small or remote communities.
“Domestic regional capacity not attributable to a mainline marketing carrier – that is, not through a capacity purchase agreement – was just 1% of regional of seats in 2019 and 2% in 2025,” said Alport.
Most CPA flights are performed with ageing, ever-more expensive regional jets, largely the Embraer ERJ and Bombardier CRJ families, which last year represented around 90% of the 1,738 aircraft of RAA airlines.
And the shortest jet route flown by an RAA member was listed as a 39-minute, 111-kilometre sector by Skywest, for United Express, between Fort Dodge and Mason City, Iowa.
“In short,” said Alport, “it’s higher operating costs, including pilot costs, that make smaller gauge flying less efficient. There’s also lack of demand at the right fare to offset these higher costs.”
Data from the Oliver Wyman Airline Economic analysis, Q3 2025, shows 63% of all regional jets operate in America.
“The cost per seat-hour for CRJ200 is up 54% versus 2019, 88% for CRJ700, and 133% for CRJ900s, whereas cost per seat-hour is up 39% for the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 families,” he added.
“Pilot costs accounted for 47% of the total increase for CRJ200s versus 36% of the total increase for mainline narrowbodies.”
With demand for pilots surging, and their earnings also taking off, airlines are deploying them on the most productive routes.
And with no like-for-like replacement on the horizon for in-demand 50-seat regional jets, there’s increasing focus on what comes next for regional markets.
The Essential Air Services programme, which guarantees a minimum level of scheduled air services for routes operated by major carriers before deregulation in 1978, has itself faced severe federal budget cuts, threatening hundreds of regional air services, and driving industry calls for increased rather than reduced government support.
“Regional aviation in the US is in the pits,” said one airline executive. “One quarter of US states have seen a 20% reduction in services. It makes a lot of sense to convert back to turboprops. It’s not radical. It’s retro.”
European aerospace company ATR, the only current manufacturer of regional turboprop airliners, sees RJ retirements, particularly in America, as a huge opportunity for next-generation turboprops.
Last year, the company partnered with the RAA, Georgia Tech University and the Seabury Airline Strategy Group to examine the decline of US regional aviation, identify its key pain points, and explore opportunities to preserve marginal markets, reactivate abandoned routes and even find entirely new ones.
Their findings were collectively reported last September in Washington DC, dovetailing with the RAA Leader’s Conference.
Seabury found that from 2005 to 2025, numbers of passengers using US regional airlines declined by 77%, not due to lower demand but because of reduced capacity.
It reported greatest reductions in north-east US regional markets, which lost 800,000 passengers, and midwest-to-northeast routes down 600,000.
“For the same period, for the US domestic industry as a whole, O&D (origin and destination) passengers were up 34.5%,” concluded Seabury.
“A 34.5% increase in these short-haul markets would have resulted in 6.9 million passengers in 2025.”
Cedric Justin, a senior researcher with the Georgia Tech University, assessed the future of 50-seat jets in America. Using data sourced from aviation research group Cirium, he identified approximately 300 of these jets, average age 22 years, operating in the US and expected to retire by 2035 – around 100 Bombardier CRJ100 and 200 models and 200 Embraer ERJ140 and 145 variants.
There were also more than 80 CRJ550s, average age 20 years, reconfigured from 70 seat, single class cabins to dual-class 50-seat layouts.
Justin estimated that 33 regional airports, or almost one in 10, are likely to lose air services unless a replacement is found for 50-seat jets, with up-gauging to 70-seaters unlikely to be profitable.
ATR blended the work of these partners with its own groundbreaking study to identify where people were travelling in regional America, and how often, by tracking the movement patterns of their mobile phones.
The planemaker used anonymised data from 80 million mobile phones and identified around 180 million journeys, from which it could determine origin and destination of devices, and frequency of travel between destinations.
It then re-created that data on maps, discovering not only that travel was continuing between many destinations which had lost scheduled flights, but also evolving between points which never had flights in the first place.
“What we identified, the problem and the opportunity, was the loss of regional air amenity in the US in the past 20 or so years,” said Alexis Vidal, ATR’s Chief Commercial Officer.
“We want to see the demand that is not captured just looking at O&D data.
“You can imagine with the underexplored coverage of smartphones these days that’s tens of millions of patterns.”
Georgia Tech’s Cedric Justin said the GPS data tracking delivered “game-changing analyses due to highly granular spatial resolution of true origins and destinations.”
He concluded from the data that journey times would increase by an average of 73 minutes for origin-destination passengers using the 33 airports considered at risk of losing regional flights and added that each route closure shifted 8% of regional airline passengers to driving.
Seabury evaluated 748 regional routes to identify opportunities for turboprop airliners once 50-seat jets were withdrawn from service.
“Significant opportunity already exists in the US for turboprops to connect ‘abandoned’ air travel markets,” it concluded, quantifying 127 routes served by 165 aircraft.
ATR is developing a next-generation turboprop, which it argues will provide better experience for passengers while reducing airline operating costs by 30% compared to regional jets.
“The routes are too thin to accommodate 60-70 seat aircraft,” said Vidal. “Regional jets are not economically viable.
“We can re-create these routes with the right assets. If we want to provide an aircraft that can do what jets can’t do any more, we’re essentially opening a new market.”
Of all intercity trips in the US, he said, 75% were between 100 and 400 nautical miles (185 – 740 kilometres), but only 4% were taken by air.
And 50% of journeys via all modes in America were outside the top 31 catchment areas, while 10% of air passengers were not flying to or from the top 31 hubs.
ATR currently produces two passenger aircraft models, the ATR 42-600 and ATR 72-600, but is exploring next-generation 30, 50 and 70 seat variants as potential replacements for ageing jets.
In January, Texas-based JSX, previously an all-jet airline offering ‘on demand’ service with all-premium cabins, introduced an ATR 42-600 ‘High Line’ aircraft, configured to seat just 30 passengers, its inaugural flight between Santa Monica and Las Vegas.
The airline, America’s largest independent regional carrier, has firm orders for 15 ATR 42 or 72 variants, and options for up to 10 more, with ATR now exploring a 50-seat, tri-class version, using a reconfigured ATR72 as the platform.
It is targeting entry into service of an all-new ‘mild hybrid-electric’ turboprop, the EVO, by 2035, with a demonstrator scheduled to fly in 2029.
The US is a major focus – not just mainline airlines or capacity service providers, which historically have favoured jets, but existing or even new independent regional airlines.
But the expense and long lead times of new aircraft could drive existing or new operators to choose older and more affordable turboprops, refurbish them, and retrofit more efficient low-or-no emission powertrains, including hydrogen-electric once the technology matures.
Another option is new commercial partnerships between independent regional carriers and mainline operators, based on code share rather than capacity purchase arrangements – a model which also would enable regionals to retain the lucrative earnings from ancillary product sales, which currently go straight to major marketing carriers.
New turboprops have a future in America, said Alton’s Bryan Terry, “but only if ATR can change the conversation from ‘turboprop’ to ‘modern regional aircraft.’
“Historically, the drag on turboprops hasn’t been the propulsion system as much as the perceived customer experience, including cabin noise, vibration, and the sense that they’re a step down from regional jets.
“If ATR delivers on those claims, turboprops become relevant again by offering regional carriers a compelling replacement path for ageing fleets and a cost-effective way to add capacity in thinner markets where right-sizing matters.
“In today’s environment, a better economics-and-experience package would be hard for the US regional industry and their major partners to ignore.”
