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Regional Jet Guide

Every regional jet in Headwinds compared: seats, range, lease cost, fuel burn, and per-seat economics. Build profitable thin routes and hub feed.

Regional jets solve a specific problem: routes with real demand, but not enough of it to fill a 150-seat narrow-body. In Headwinds that describes a huge share of the map — secondary cities, short cross-border hops, and above all hub feed, the short flights that funnel connecting passengers into your hub for onward long-haul travel.

Per-seat costs run higher than larger jets; that is the price of right-sizing. A regional jet is not competing with an A320 on cost per seat — it is competing with the empty seats the A320 would fly on a thin route. Judged that way, the category is one of the most reliably profitable in the game.

How to choose

The E-Jet and CRJ families cover the 70–130 seat band; the E2 generation offers materially better burn for a higher lease. At the small end, 50-seaters only make sense on very thin or very short missions where nothing bigger could break even. As always: pick the seat count the route can fill, not the one with the prettiest efficiency number.

All 26 aircraft at a glance

Figures are the game's actual values. Fuel cost assumes the base fuel price of $1.20/litre — the live market price in your save drifts between roughly half and nearly double that, which is why fuel hedging matters.

Small jets, contested map

Regional jets exist to serve demand that a 150-seater would fly half-empty. That logic is unchanged in Headwinds — but on a shared map the category acquires a second job it never had in solo play: it is the cheapest instrument you own for holding ground, and the cheapest way to add frequency to a market you are trying not to lose.

When a rival enters one of your routes, the demand split responds to fares, frequency, quality and reputation. Frequency is the lever that gains share without wrecking the fare environment you both depend on, and a regional jet lets you add departures in small, affordable increments. Splitting a market's capacity across an E-Jet flown daily rather than a narrow-body flown four times a week often wins the business traveller outright, at a lease you can carry indefinitely if the fight drags on. Attrition favours whoever can afford to keep going.

The gate problem — read this before a scarcity world

Regional jets have the worst seats-per-gate ratio of any passenger category in the game, and in worlds created with gate scarcity enabled that is a strategic weakness rather than a footnote. Airports there have fixed capacity by size (25 / 100 / 250 / 500 gates), no airline may hold above 60% of one, an alliance's members may not hold above 80% between them, and once an airport passes 90% occupancy every carrier at it pays a 20% congestion surcharge. New gates enter the world only through sealed-bid auctions that open at week 40 and settle at the year tick, or through a player choosing to sell you one.

A gate costs the same whether a 50-seater or a 230-seater is standing at it. At a congested airport, a regional jet is spending a genuinely scarce asset to move very few people — and if you are running a fleet of them into a full hub, you are paying a congestion surcharge for the privilege. The category's home in a scarcity world is the spoke: uncongested secondary fields where gates are plentiful and cheap, feeding a hub where your larger aircraft do the heavy lifting.

Cheap ground, held

The flip side is one of the more elegant plays available in a scarcity world. Gates are use-it-or-lose-it: an airline that doesn't fly to an airport for 24 consecutive weeks forfeits its gates back into the pool and is locked out of leasing there for another 24. That is a brutal penalty in a contested world — half a game year with no way back into an airport you had already paid to enter.

A single regional jet on a modest schedule is the least expensive way to keep a claim alive at an airport you intend to grow into later, or to stay resident at a field you won at auction before your bigger aircraft are ready for it. Players who treat presence as a resource, rather than treating every route as a P&L line in isolation, end worlds holding territory that rivals were locked out of.

Every airline is guaranteed five gates at its home hub even when the airport is full, and those guaranteed gates can never be sold. Everything beyond them is genuinely contested — which is why holding a foothold cheaply is worth more than it looks.

Feed is what you're actually selling

Hub feed matters more in Headwinds than it does solo, because it is the part of your network that can be shared. Player-founded alliances top out at eight members, charge a weekly fee, and pay interline revenue on itineraries crossing member networks along with a demand boost where a partner also flies. A regional fleet that funnels traffic into a hub your allies fly long-haul from turns short thin sectors into revenue on somebody else's trunk — and makes you the member of the alliance nobody wants to lose.

It also changes who you should ally with. A partner whose long-haul network starts where your feed ends is worth several times a partner with a route map shaped like yours. Overlap splits demand you already had; complement creates itineraries neither airline could sell alone.

Pick a family and stay in it

Two Headwinds systems punish a scattered regional fleet. Jet bases — the hangars that cut what a check or a breakdown costs and how long the aircraft is stuck — are certified per aircraft family, and a base consumes between one and three gates at the airport it occupies. And reserve cover only works type-for-type: a standby aircraft at a hub can cover a grounded tail only if it is the same type. A regional operation built on one E-Jet or CRJ family can be covered and based cheaply; the same number of aircraft spread across four families cannot be covered at all.

That argues strongly for choosing a family early and living with a slightly imperfect seat count rather than optimising each route with a different type. The E2 generation burns materially less than the aircraft it replaced and leases for more; the older E-Jets and CRJs remain the value entry, with the caveat that repair bills scale with airframe age — roughly triple at twenty years — so an ageing regional fleet needs its base and its standby in place before the first failure, not after. Fleet planning covers sequencing that; hub strategy covers the bank the feed flows into.

Type-by-type notes