United made it easy for me this week. The airline held its big media day right in my background at United’s hangar at LAX, and it was quite an event filled with a ton of news. We talk about the general themes on The Air Show podcast this week, but today I want to focus on my favorite announcement of them all, the creation of the CRJ450.
United rolled out a lot of hard product changes this week. We had the chance to walk through the new premium-heavy B787-9 (the so-called Elevated interior) which goes into service in less than a month. We were told about the new Coastliner A321neo which will become the transcon airplane of choice. And yes, there was more detail about the A321XLR configuration, including the new flat beds that we could sit in. We were told about the new Relax Row (Air New Zealand’s Skycouch), and there were a bunch of soft product changes as well.
Overall, it shows an airline that is making serious, firm, expensive investments, and it’s nothing short of impressive to watch. But in the corner of the hangar, in the shadow of that B787-9, sat a shiny CRJ200 — I didn’t even know they could be polished up enough to look shiny anymore — that to me held the most interesting change of all. Say hello to the CRJ450.
Does it just look like a CRJ200? That’s because it is. And in fact, this doesn’t require a new type certificate or anything like that. The CRJ450 is a marketing name for what is ultimately a vastly improved product that will breathe life into this airframe.
Instead of 50 regular coach seats, these SkyWest-operated airplanes will now have seven First Class seats, 16 Economy Plus, and 18 regular Economy seats onboard. For those who aren’t great at math, this means there will now be only 41 seats onboard the airplane. If you’ve ever seen the CRJ550 which is a CRJ700 with 50 seats onboard, then you’ll get the idea.
United has also said it is growing its CRJ550 fleet, but the world is running out of CRJ700s that can be converted. With a still substantial fleet of CRJ200s flying around, it had to make some decisions on what to do with those. United has seen what a true dual-class operation can do for revenues, and this math works. I spoke with someone at United who said he would have laughed this off a few years ago, but seeing what revenues do when there’s a true dual-class airplane over the last few years, he is now a true believer.
So what is it like on the inside? Well, take a look at this sweet ride.
It’s a big improvement from the old interiors, but the way this has been designed is pretty slick in several ways. Up at the front left of that photo above, you’ll see a cabinet. Here is the full view:
There are seven compartments, one for each First Class seat to store a full-size rollerbag. It’s not shown here, but the cabinet is pretty deep, so you can push your bag back and have room for coats or small items as well. Then up top, the closed cabinet you see is also available for extra items if needed. This allowed United to remove the overhead bins entirely in First Class, making for a much different feel than the usual CRJ200 cramped cabin. (The bigger CRJ700/900/1000s have lower floors, so they don’t feel nearly as cramped.)
In the back, there is a near 50-50 split between Economy Plus and regular coach seating. But with only 34 total seats back there, all of a sudden there is room for most rollerbags to be stored sideways in the bins.
Sure, you still have to hunch over to look out the window, but overall it is a much better experience for everyone onboard. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that United will install Starlink on all these airplanes.
I think we can agree the experience looks great, but it’s what this enables that really makes me interested in this plan. The CRJ450 will fly from the Denver and Chicago hubs. (I was told eventually it may very well fly to Houston too in some form.) But the idea here is to connect small and mid-size cities to United’s big domestic hubs, so people can connect beyond.
I dove into Cirium data and found that from Denver and Chicago, this coming July has 84 routes scheduled on the CRJ200. Now, 50 of these markets are only on the CRJ200 for all flights, but that means 34 of them have mixed flying. Here are those markets:
Data via Cirium, Maps generated by the Great Circle Mapper® – copyright © Karl L. Swartz.
This is a really bad experience for the local customer who gets very different offerings on different flights. This will now go away completely with the CRJ450.
Think of this in another way, in a competitive sense. There are 79 cities that are scheduled to receive CRJ200 service in July 2026, and 44 of those also have service from American, Delta, or Alaska on dual-class airplanes. United is less competitive in those markets, and now that issue will go away.
I would argue that even in the other cities without competition, this becomes quite attractive. Of course, many of the cities that get CRJ200 service today are markets that are funded by Essential Air Service subsidy. Offering a dual-class airplane in those bids will undoubtedly give SkyWest an even greater leg up than it already has in winning those bids.
SVP Global Network and Alliances Patrick Quayle pointed out on stage at media day that United serves more cities than any other airline on earth — he even challenged me from the stage to look it up. Sure enough, the airline has 393 airports on the route map in 2026, 24 more than second-place Air France-KLM. (I took the definition of “airline” generously and included whole airline groups.) I would imagine that this might help up that count even further with such an attractive offering to EAS communities.
The cherry on top of all this is that you know a ton of these flights don’t even get over the 82 percent seat factor required to make the loss of 9 seats onboard even matter. That’s especially true in EAS markets where passenger loads tend to be lower.
I can’t see loads by flight, but looking at all of 2025, United flew the CRJ200 in 94 markets (excluding random one-offs). Of those, 59 markets had a lower than 82 percent load overall. The CRJ200 had a systemwide 75 percent seat factor. Again, that’s not flight-specific, but it shows there is slack there in many cases.
In the end, this is a creative move that just improves United’s relevance and competitivness in small to mid-size markets. Now it needs to figure out what to do with the remaining ERJ-145s, the only single-class airplanes left in United’s future fleet. Today, those fly out of Houston and Washington/Dulles, but they are too narrow to do the same conversion. United will once again have to get creative, but that really doesn’t seem like an issue for the airline.
This is just one small piece of what United announced this week, but Jon and I get into so much more, including higher-level discussion, on this week’s episode of The Air Show which will be up later Thursday afternoon.
