United Airlines has just fired the first shot in the new airline wars. Don't believe me? Look at what they did last week. On October 27, O'Hare International Airport saw the inaugural flight of the CRJ-550, a reimagined regional jet. The plane is identical to a CRJ-700 on the outside, but on the inside, United took the 70-seat aircraft and turned it into a 50-seater. You read that correctly. In this modern age of seemingly fewer and fewer passenger amenities in the air, a legacy carrier ripped out 20 seats to make a more comfortable plane. But it's not just the extra legroom that is revolutionary. An often-maligned feature of regional jets is the paltry storage space, necessitating some poor sap gate-checking their bag. Not on the CRJ-550. Some of those 20 seats were replaced by a series of storage lockers in the cabin, supplementing the overhead bins(which have themselves been expanded). Long story short, gate-checking carry-ons just became a thing of the past. What makes this truly revolutionary is the potential it represents. If the CRJ-550 catches on with passengers and starts making money, I can see other airlines taking notice. And maybe not just in the regional market either. How long before some executive gets the bright idea to try this on a 737? Or even a 777? The CRJ-550 could very well be the definition of a game-changer.
