With the American regional aviation model broken, consolidation is the answer

The old regional airline, capacity-purchase model is well and truly broken and airlines must evolve to find a more profitable model, Dahlman Rose analyst Helane Becker said in her latest briefing in a harsh evaluation of the sector based on losses and current efforts to restructure.

Regionals have been evolving, expanding capacity purchase portfolios or acquiring branded operations such as Republic's acquisition of Midwest and Frontier to form Frontier Airlines. Even so, that doesn't seem enough simply because they are still so many aircraft in a vastly shrinking regional airline system.