Piedmont has long seemed like an airline living on borrowed time. For years it was the airline flying the smallest and least desirable fleets. On more than one occasion, it seemed like its time was up, but it never was. And once again, the airline has avoided death as it has received an allotment of Embraer 175s from its parent, American. The mighty Pacemaker lives on… well, sort of.
Piergiuliano Chesi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In truth, this is not the airline that is tied to the Route of the Pacemakers, but saying that gave me the opportunity to put up that sexy B737-200 photo anyway. That Piedmont was a local service carrier that was bought by USAir in 1987. The only remnant of that airline today is a rather big one… American’s Charlotte hub, which it picked up through the US Airways merger.
As it was wont to do, USAir liked to keep its conquests’ intellectual property alive by repurposing the names. In the mid-1990s, Jetstream was renamed PSA to keep that airline’s name in use. The same thing happened to Suburban, turning into Allegheny. And Salisbury (MD)-based Henson was renamed Piedmont.
JetPix (GFDL 1.2 or GFDL 1.2), via Wikimedia Commons
Henson was started as a regional feeder out of Hagerstown (MD) back in the 1960s by the man, the myth, the legend… Dick Henson. It was way back then that it even started flying as Allegheny Commuter for Allegheny Airlines, eventually moving the whole thing to Salisbury. In 1983, Piedmont bought Henson to get the airline’s feed for itself, but a few years later, the whole thing fell back into the Allegheny family, now under the USAir name.
Under USAir, later US Airways, Piedmont became a turboprop specialist. By 1997, it was only flying Dash 8 aircraft ranging from the 37-seat -100 up to the 50-seat -300 variant. With all the uncertainty after 9/11, Piedmont could have been killed off, but instead it got stronger. Allegheny and its northeast US-flying was merged into Piedmont.
Piedmont’s operations peaked in 2005 when it was doing significant flying in Philly, Charlotte, LaGuardia, and Pittsburgh. But then it started to fall.
Piedmont Annual Departures by Hub
Data via Cirium
America West took over US Airways in 2005, and the new US Airways shuttered its Pittsburgh hub. Unprofitable regional flying was cut back throughout the network. By 2013, Piedmont was largely focused on Philly and Charlotte with a minor operation at Washington/National, but it continued to shrink.
US Airways took over American at the end of 2013, and that coincided with the Dash 8s starting to hit the end of their lives. Piedmont was shrinking, and it had no real future unless American wanted it to survive.
It got lucky. American decided that it wanted Envoy — the former American Eagle — to focus on larger regional jets, so Piedmont became the designated 50-seat jet operator. It first flew an ERJ-145 in scheduled service in 2016. And on July 4, 2018 the transition was complete when it operated its last turboprop flight with a run from its primary Charlotte hub up to its Salisbury home.
The ERJs were good for the airline, and the fleet grew quickly as airplanes were moved over from Envoy. But now, it has reached another inflection point. Post-pandemic, many of the airplanes were stored, seemingly for good. Today, Piedmont has 69 ERJ-145s flying, well below its high point. And these are not young airplanes. The youngest in the fleet will turn 20 next month.
The airline’s mix of flying began to change in 2020 when Charlotte passed Philly as the airline’s largest hub. That gulf has only widened. In 2024, it was 60 percent larger in Charlotte than Philly. All of those newer, fancier 65-76 seat aircraft with extra legroom and first class onboard had to be deployed somewhere. And Charlotte was the place with the most small market routes where the competitive edge didn’t matter as much.
But with pilots making a lot more money at regionals these days and revenue lagging without premium cabins, the days of these 50-seaters are numbered throughout the US industry. Piedmont could have shrunk into oblivion, but it has been thrown a lifeline once again.
Starting in 2028, Piedmont will start operating its first 76-seater, an Embraer 175. After three years, it will be fully built out with 45 of the airplanes. It will continue to fly the ERJ-145s well into the 2030s, but eventually those will be gone completely.
Though we don’t know where these airplanes will be flying since it’s three years away, it will complement the wholly-owned Envoy fleet of Embraer 175s within American as well as the CRJ-700/900s of PSA. American clearly likes having multiple wholly-owned operators so it can try to play them off each other and gain more leverage with labor. It also likes to have solid operators like Piedmont in the fold. It would certainly seem operationally easy to merge an Envoy and Piedmont, but there’s probably not that much of a reason to bother. Then again, 2028 is a long ways off, so we’ll see if anything changes by the time that first airplane flies.
For now, Piedmont will continue to soldier on, defying the odds to keep flying as it continues to operate bigger and nicer airplanes. By 2040, who knows? Maybe it’ll pick up some A380s on the used market….
The Air Show went live early this week where Brian and I took a deeper look at what the United/JetBlue deal says about both airlines and the others in the industry. Also, watch this space over the weekend. Our next episode will be going up way earlier than normal.
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