Safety board asking tough questions about regional airlines

The National Transportation Safety Board is taking a hard look at the regional airline business, a vital and little-understood part of the U.S. aviation system. Roughly half of all domestic U.S. passengers fly on regional carrriers, the ones we in the media often still call commuter airlines, which usually operate using names like US Airways Express or American Eagle. These are separate companies that the major carriers have so-called "code-sharing" arrangements with. The big guys contract with the regionals to feed passengers into their hubs from cities, both large and small, where the big airlines don't have enough traffic to justify using a jet with 130 or more seats. It's the world of all those smaller planes, from 30-seat turboprops through 50-, 70- and 90-seat jets -- planes you often don't know you're going to fly until you get to the airport.

The NTSB is holding a two-day forum in Washington on safety issues arising from airline code sharing, both the domestic kind outlined above and sharing of codes between U.S. and foreign carriers for international flights. The board's concern about whether the regional are as safe to fly as the major carriers arose from the fact that the last six fatal airline accidents in this country have been operated by the smaller airlines. Read a good USA Today story about the forum here; it includes a link to a longer AP story.

The USA Today story also references a survey, conducted by our locally based Business Travel Coalition, for the NTSB forum of more than 200 business-travel managers and other industry officials, who say the regionals' safety issues worry them and their travelers.  The survey results make important and disturbing reading and can be found at this link.