Brazil's Embraer jets are sized right for U.S. market

SAO JOSE DOS CAMPOS, Brazil -- Aircraft workers here on a big assembly line about an hour north of Sao Palo wield screeching rivet guns on the tails and fuselages of a half-dozen gleaming new jets.

Many of the planes they're making — 70- to 124-seat Embraer "E-Jets," as they're dubbed in the industry — will shuttle people between New York, Boston, Washington and Chicago on Delta. Or, some will ferry passengers on JetBlue flights from Boston to Bermuda, New York to Nassau or Fort Lauderdale to Cancun, Mexico.

If you've flown up to half-way across the country, chances are good you've been on a plane made by Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer. Nearly every U.S. airline or their regional partners are flying its newer E-Jets or older, smaller ERJ jets that seat 37 to 50 passengers. In all, Embraer counts more than 850 of its aircraft in the fleets of U.S. carriers.

Thanks in large part to the popularity of its small to midsize jets in the U.S., Embraer has emerged as a competitor against Canada's Bombardier for the title of the world's third-biggest manufacturer of commercial planes behind U.S. giant Boeing and Europe's Airbus.

"For us, North America is — and will continue to be — the most important market in terms of the potential to sell new products here," says Paulo Cesar Silva, Embraer's president for Commercial Aviation. "Aviation in North America is about 40% of aviation in the world."

The success of Brazil's Embraer in the U.S. market is something that other developing nations that seek to undertake world-class commercial aircraft production, such as China and Russia, now only aspire to.

The commercial aviation landscape is littered with failed efforts by many nations to compete with U.S. and European plane-makers in producing planes for use in what's been the globe's top passenger aircraft market.

"Nobody would have predicted this," Richard Aboulafia of Virginia-based Teal Group, an aerospace analysis firm, says of Embraer's success. "And in dozens of other cases, they'd have been right."

Driving the popularity of E-Jets in the U.S. is their size and range, and comfort for passengers.

The E-Jets — the E170 and E175 models with seating for 70 to 88 passengers and the E190 and E195 models with room for 93 to 124 passengers — help U.S. airlines reduce their capacity to match a lower demand for travel, as fewer people are flying in these tight economic times.

To reduce capacity, airlines can cut flights or fly smaller planes. E-Jets allow them to fly smaller planes that carry fewer passengers than Boeing 737s, the best-selling aircraft in commercial aviation history, or Airbus A320s, both of which can carry 150 passengers or more.

E-Jets, Silva says, allow airlines to fly in and out of smaller cities where passenger loads aren't big enough to justify flying 737s or A320s.

At the same time, he says, the smaller E-Jets allow airlines to "improve services by providing a certain route with more frequency" during peak flying hours in the morning and evening, while carrying a smaller load in the middle of the day when fewer are flying.

There's no dreaded middle seat

For passengers, E-Jets are popular because they're big enough to stand up in as you walk down the aisle — like 737s and 320s, but unlike other smaller regional jets, such as Bombardier's competing Canadair CRJs that seat from 50 to 100 passengers or Embraer's own, smaller ERJs (short for Embraer Regional Jets).

Perhaps most important for fliers, E-Jets don't have the dreaded middle seat. E-Jets are single-aisle planes, with two seats on each side for passengers rather than three, as in larger single-aisle 737s and 320s.

"From a customer perspective, an Embraer 170 or (190 series) is going to be more comfortable than most other aircraft that size," says Brett Snyder, author of the blog CrankyFlier.com and founder of Cranky Concierge air travel assistance service. "There's no question that the bigger E-Jets are much more like the traditional mainline jets."

Despite their advantages, even the biggest of the E-Jets — the E190s and 195s — don't have the range to fly across the country with a full load of passengers. Cross-country flights remain the province of bigger jets built by Boeing and Airbus.

But E-Jets can get you partially or even half-way there. That's why if you're on a Delta Shuttle flight to or from New York LaGuardia, you almost certainly are flying on a 76-seat Embraer 175.

At JetBlue, Embraer 190s make up about 30% of the airline's overall fleet, plying domestic routes as well as some of its Caribbean routes.

Embraer's 50-seat ERJs also are being flown across borders. If you're flying to Mexico on United, you'll be on Embraer ERJ 145s if you're headed to cities such as Torreon, Queretaro and Veracruz. United even flies them on its business-oriented Houston-Mexico City route on three its nine daily round-trip flights.

"Regional jets allow United to offer flights that would otherwise not be viable on any other aircraft type," says Brian Znotins, United's managing director of international planning. "In some cases, markets like Veracruz and Torreon don't have enough passenger demand to fill a 120-plus seat airplane. So a 50-seat airplane is the only financially viable way to offer service in the market."

On a route like Mexico City-Houston, Znotins says, the smaller regional ERJ 145 jets "allow us to offer flights in those time channels that would otherwise go unserved."

"This allows us to augment our existing larger-jet flying," he says, "which provides a more complete schedule to passengers looking for service throughout the day and helps to fill all the other flights in the market — regional jets and larger airplanes alike."

Embraer had great timing

The emergence of Embraer as a major supplier of planes for the U.S. market has been fairly rapid.

Once a government-owned company making military and commercial aircraft for Brazil's domestic market, Embraer was taken private in 1994 and began expanding its commercial aircraft production, focusing on regional aircraft. Now, it's Brazil's biggest industrial exporter as a publicly traded company that also produces executive and military aircraft.

The company's timing has been fortunate, as it introduced new planes just as U.S. market demands changed. In 1990, only 216 Embraer aircraft were counted in U.S. fleets. That number included Embraer turboprops used by airlines' regional affiliates, and tiny and relatively obscure local operations.

But in 1995, Embraer introduced its regional jet, or ERJ. That positioned the aircraft maker for rapid growth in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Its first model, the 50-seat ERJ 145, made its first flight in August 1995. It spawned variants — the 37-seat ERJ 135 and the 44-seat ERJ 140.

The ERJ line arrived just as U.S. carriers had begun searching for small short-range jets that could replace unpopular turboprops on routes that fed their hub cities. In December 1996, Continental's Continental Express unit, now ExpressJet owned by Skywest Airlines, took delivery of the first of what would eventually be more than 270 ERJ regional jets.

American affiliate American Eagle followed with a big ERJ order of its own, and Embraer quickly found itself in a race with Canada's Bombardier for supremacy in the regional aircraft market.

With the success of its ERJs, the number of Embraer planes in U.S. fleets nearly doubled from 1995 to 2000, from 231 to 401, according to Embraer's count. By 2005, the number of Embraer planes flying in U.S. airlines fleets had again doubled — soaring to 802, according to Embraer.

Embraer's momentum continued during the second half of the decade, again in part because of the company's good timing in introducing the E170 and E190 models.

Sort of a Goldilocks thing

The E170 went into commercial airline service in 2004; the E190 followed in 2005 when JetBlue was the first to fly them . The new, roomier E-Jets quickly found traction. They gave the airlines just what they were looking for: a midsize option between the 50-seat regional jets and full-sized Boeing and Airbus models.

While airlines couldn't get enough of the 50-seaters before 2001, increasingly volatile fuel prices and the effect of union contracts that governed an airline's fleet makeup made them money-losers for many airlines.

E-Jets also gave passengers more room, as the cramped 50-seat regional jets had proved to be unpopular for fliers on anything but the shortest or trips.

The new E-Jets gave Embraer an advantage against Canadian rival Bombardier, which also had begun offering bigger regional jets that could carry more passengers — but without the roomier cabins offered on E-Jets.

Aboulafia of the Teal Group says the success of the Brazilian plane-maker the last 15 years has been stunning.

"They started as a money-losing military job shop, but they were in the right place at the right time with a regional jet in the 1990s, and then they had the sense to leverage that windfall by privatizing," Aboulafia says. "Since then, they've been world class."