Famed for high speed, strong operating performance, and operational versatility,
seats for sale by the Dash-8-Q400 have totaled 759 million since 2004. Over 2,500 routes have
seen the type since then, and in this video we look into the world’s longest.
In the 17 years to 2021, analysis indicates that the Dash-8-Q400 has had over 10 million round-trip
flights and 759 million seats available for sale. To put that into perspective,
the type has had just around 1% of all seats worldwide by all aircraft.
These figures mean that the Q400 has had almost twice as much capacity as all other Dash-8
variants (-100/200/300) put together. However, it has fewer seats than the alternative prop,
the ATR-72 (of all variants), although this aircraft has, of course, existed for much longer.
The Dash-8-Q400 has been used on more than 2,500 routes since 2004, a figure which includes
fairly large numbers of one-off and time-limited services, such as Birmingham to Cork (operated
by Flybe; until 2004), Damascus to Amman (flown by Royal Jordanian; 2005-2007), and the 714-mile
link from Los Angeles to Gunnison, Colorado (flown by Alaska Airlines from 2015-2017).
Across these 17 years, the median route length was 354 miles. And curiously,
this has changed only slightly year on year (350 miles in 2004 and 330 miles in 2019). The type’s
most-served airport-pairs in this period are all between 147 and 307 miles. The top city pairs are
Toronto City to Montreal, Portland-Seattle, Toronto City-Ottawa, and Canberra-Sydney.
This discussion of non-stop distance somewhat misses the point. For why the median is relatively
low – as you’d expect – there are and have been large numbers of much longer routes. Indeed,
400+routes over 750 miles and 40 over 1,000 miles have seen the type to some extent.
If the whole 17-year period is examined, the 1,544-mile link from Johannesburg to Angola’s
capital Luanda was the longest scheduled by South Africa’s CemAir. But like most in the top-10,
shown here, it had very limited service – in fact, just one flight. Notice the predominance
of domestic Russian services, mainly in Siberia, and Porter’s long Ottawa to Melbourne, Florida.
While not quite making into the top-10 longest routes, the most-served 1,000-mile-plus
airport-pair was Ethiopian Airlines’ Addis Ababa to Dar Es Salaam, 1,090 miles away.
Operating between 2010 and 2019,
this service had almost 1,900 flights in all with a block time of up to three and a half hours.
Not surprisingly, the type was normally deployed on the lower-demanded overnight service
to/from Tanzania, returning to feed Ethiopian’s departures across Africa.
Such long routes are obviously very much into jet territory – specifically focused
on in the Q400’s design stage – indicating the type’s fast speed, although it is nonetheless
sub-optimal. Importantly, it also indicates how it can operate many types of missions
(if required), given an airline’s network, nature of demand, and revenue per mile.
What are your experiences of the Dash-8-400? Let us know in the comments.