Originally Posted by
GreatChecko
What really happened was that Bedford made it so that Lynx was too expensive to keep. By canceling the orders, he took a company that was designed to grow and stagnated it, setting it up to fail from day one.
Checko
FWIW, Republic stated last week that serious consideration was given to keeping Lynx around via contracted flying with another carrier. Apparently there were no takers.
While the Q400s had a great fuel burn rate, the entire operation was rather inefficient and costly. The Q400s were an orphaned fleet once the remaining options were cancelled. There were a lot of costs to support the operating certificate, flight crews, maintenance, and other various operations. While some of these functions would have been rolled into the growing Republic operations, many of the costs associated with the Lynx operations would still be there.
Personally, I would have loved to see some of the Q400s moved to MKE to take over some of the larger regional routes and open new markets. Sadly, that won't be happening (at least with Republic).