Originally Posted by
Herb687
Brings back memories of one fine day when I had access to a presentation by the regional affiliate of a major carrier. They were evaluating putting RJs into a few Colorado ski country airports. When said airline's flight ops leadership put some poor line pilots into sims to fly the procedures as they then existed, the results were "unacceptably high rates of CFIT."
Those airports are much more complex. That's why, even at mainline, JAC (Jackson, WY) and EGE (Vail, CO), the Captains need special training before they can operate to those airports. ASE (Aspen, CO), which has been a CRJ-700 city, required special crew qualifications as well.
OT but later on I was similarly entertained by the aftermath of the FAA's transition to RNAV STARs and implementation of "descend via" clearance phraseology. When originally implemented, DFW's RNAV STARs had a bottom altitude of 8000' on "high side" arrivals with crossing restrictions at 11,000' to protect departures who get an initial climb to 10,000'. Altitude busts left and right by highly skilled, highly trained professional aviators ensued.
The E-145s and (almost all) CRJs lack VNAV which calculates a vertical path which meets all of the speed and altitude restrictions on such an arrival. You can still fly them, but the workload is much higher. Higher workload leads to more errors.