Timing may be everything in determining who supplies India’s airlines with smaller capacity jets. And now that five manufacturers are vying for a piece of the huge Indian market, Embraer faces new competition in an airplane category it is credited with creating.

The frenzy of new aircraft orders for Airbus at this year’s Paris Air Show confirmed an industry on the rebound. The European manufacturer’s order book swelled by more than a thousand units in less than a week, thanks to airlines that were quick to sign up for its re-engined A320 family that promises better fuel burn to help keep costs in check. Yet there was another one thousand order milestone that didn’t capture quite the same attention but was, in some ways, probably more significant. Embraer, in its often understated way, announced that it had reached the landmark sales figure for its family of 70- to 120-seat E-Jets.

In a segment that is often misunderstood and frequently overlooked amid the publicity generated by mega-capacity airplanes and the rivalry between the world’s two biggest air framers, Brazil’s Embraer owns a commanding share of the market between 50-seat regional jets and larger single aisle jets. What is particularly remarkable is that aircraft for that capacity segment didn’t really exist a decade ago. As Embraer claims, it “tapped the gap.” And it did it in a very short time, just seven years after its first new airplane entered revenue service with LOT Polish Airlines.

Educating to Change Perceptions

The 70 to 120-seat category falls in the middle of two welldefined groups of airplanes. When Embraer began marketing its new aircraft, it knew their performance and cabin attributes were in a class above the traditional small regional jet standards. Since the letter R reinforced the association with all things regional, it quickly distanced itself from the pack by boldly dropping the original ERJ designation and creating the E-Jets moniker.

The manufacturer then embarked on a marketing campaign that put greater emphasis on the opportunities in the capacity segment rather than the four airplanes themselves. “Because there was no airplane family ever optimised for the category before, prospective customers needed to know where and how they could deploy our E-Jets,” according to Alex Glock, Embraer’s Airline Market Vice President for Asia Pacific. “It wasn’t simply a case of build it and they will come. This was new territory for a lot of companies, including us.”

Often Misunderstood

New territory, indeed. While carriers in the more developed markets of North America and Europe recognised the capacity gap, airlines in most other parts of the world had trouble figuring out where 70 and 100-seat jets could work. The regional jet revolution never touched them and the absence of large fleets of small airplanes never generated a capacity gap. Long accustomed to operating only large single-aisle or wide-body transports, a 150-seat jet was considered a small aircraft by most of those airlines.

Things changed quickly after the drastic global market contraction and rising fuel prices in 2001. Embraer started booking orders for its new E-Jets from North American and European carriers who were suddenly faced with empty seats. Initially intended to replace their newly uneconomical small regional jets and over-capacity Boeing and Airbus single-aisle aircraft, a decision to right-size fleets as it is widely called, the new Embraer aircraft took on some remarkably different roles.

Instead of flying traditional short-haul routes, carriers like Air Canada integrated the airplanes in their mainline schedules. They added audio and video on demand entertainment systems with TV screens at every seat, installed dedicated premium cabins, offered a variety of seat pitch to make configurations compatible with their larger airplanes, and they started flying them on some very long sectors. Today, the 100-seat Embraer E190s routinely fly five-hour legs. Between Perth and the Keeling Islands, just off the coast of Java, Virgin Australia is flying its E190s non-stop four hours and forty minutes, a sector flown entirely over water.

Any lingering perceptions of regional jets and their narrow business applications came to an abrupt end six years ago when a scrappy little American airline named Jet Blue Airways broke with traditional thinking and added 100-seat airplanes to its fleet of 156-seat A320s. Until then, low-cost carriers had followed the gospel of a single aircraft type as the only formula for success, touting efficiencies of scale and unit cost advantages. Since then, low-cost carriers (LCC) in Austria, Brazil, the UK and Saudi Arabia have adopted the two-aircraft type strategy. Large jets work well for highdemand LCC markets. Smaller jets have proven that they can work where their bigger siblings cannot.

Overlooked No More

Success breeds competition. Embraer’s vision for the market segment and its subsequent large international portfolio of EJet customers (now 60 airlines from 40 countries) was bound to attract competitors. Bombardier of Canada stretched its venerable CRJ platform yet again to capture untapped interest in the 100-seat category while the Russians and Japanese have both launched their own from-scratch programmes to challenge Embraer’s E-Jets. Earlier this year, the Sukhoi Super Jet entered revenue service and Mitsubishi cut the first metal for its regional jet.

Even the Chinese, with a somewhat adapted ARJ21 design, are competing for a piece of the 70 to 120-seat pie. It remains to be seen if the newcomers can duplicate the benchmark of mission versatility that E-Jets has set. Time will tell if operators of the SSJ and MRJ will deploy their airplanes on five-hour sectors or fly them in a LCC business model.

If there were any doubts as to the viability of the 70- to 120-seat aircraft category, leasing companies have dispelled them. Traditionally preferring the security of proven Boeing and Airbus jets, lessors have finally embraced the 100-seat aircraft segment. Embraer E-Jets are the preferred small jet for Air Lease Corporation, a Los Angeles-based lessor run by Steven Udvar-Hazy, the former CEO of International Lease Finance Corporation.