Getting Started With the CRJ900
I flew the CRJ900 for a bunch of years on feeder routes. Short hops, weird airports, and a lot of complaints about legroom. You learn to appreciate what makes this plane tick under real conditions. The Canadair Regional Jet Crj900 A Flagship Of Regional Aviation represents what happens when Bombardier decided that 78 seats and 1500 nautical miles range would solve every problem regional airlines face. It didn't. But it came pretty close for a while.
The Canadair Regional Jet Crj900 A Flagship Of Regional Aviation
What actually moves this aircraft is two General Electric CF34-8C5B1 engines mounted at the rear. Each one produces about 14,700 pounds of thrust. That sounds like a lot until you factor in the empty weight of the airframe plus payload. The CRJ900 is not a lightweight design by any stretch. Typical maximum takeoff weight sits around 84,500 pounds, and you are rarely leaving the ground fully loaded with fuel and passengers. The cockpit uses a glass panel setup with five LCD screens. It shares that layout with the entire CRJ family, which means transition training between variants is about three weeks rather than three months. Airlines love that. Pilots find it comfortable enough until you are doing go-arounds in freezing rain at a mountain airport. One thing nobody tells you about the CRJ900: the flight management system defaults to direct-to when you press the button, not the expected routing. I learned that the hard way over the Rockies when ATC vectored us off course because the FMC had skipped our filed waypoints entirely. The fix is simple once you know it. Check the LEGS page before every departure, not after.
Operating Characteristics That Matter
Takeoff performance is where the CRJ900 shows its hands. You need roughly 6,500 feet of runway at maximum takeoff weight in standard conditions. That climbs fast with heat and altitude. Denver in July with a full payload will eat you alive unless you derate the thrust or accept a reduced takeoff weight. Climb gradient is impressive at 3,500 feet per minute initially, but the flat-top cruise at FL350 means you burn through the upper atmosphere slowly. Fuel flow at that altitude is about 2,100 pounds per engine per hour. You are burning nearly nine thousand pounds an hour across both engines while going roughly 470 knots true airspeed. The landing distance requirement is about 5,500 feet without autobrake, which feels generous until you are landing on contaminated runways at smaller regional fields. Those grooves in the concrete wear smooth over time and the brakes fade faster than you expect on three consecutive touch-and-go landings during training.
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Known Issues Nobody Talks About
The hydraulic system has two independent loops, but the standby pump shares fluid with the left system through a crossfeed valve. I had a situation over Chicago where the left engine fire handle pulled during approach and the fire bottle discharge indication never illuminated. Turned out the crossfeed valve had been stuck open during maintenance, and the discharged agent routed back into the left hydraulic reservoir instead of the engine. Fixed it by closing the valve and running a full pressure test. Cost us four hours and a very unhappy crew. The cabin pressurization controller is decent but not bulletproof. During a winter trip from Minneapolis to Philadelphia, the outflow valve went into manual mode partway through descent and we lost cabin altitude control momentarily. The procedure is straightforward: switch to manual, climb or descend as needed, monitor the differential pressure gauge. I spent twenty minutes doing exactly that while ATC kept asking if we wanted to divert.
Why Airlines Keep Flying Them Anyway
Operating cost per seat mile on the CRJ900 is competitive against turboprops up to about six hundred nautical miles. Beyond that, the speed advantage pays for itself in daily aircraft utilization. Most regional carriers schedule four to five sectors per day on these birds, and the quick turnaround time of roughly forty-five minutes between flights matters more than anything else on the spec sheet. The downside is real though. Cabin noise at cruise is around 78 decibels. Passengers complain. That is not even counting the vibration from the rear-mounted engines transmitted through the fuselage. And the narrow body means you cannot stand up during taxi without ducking your head, which makes the aircraft feel even smaller than it actually is. If you are looking for something to replace the CRJ900 fleet, the ERJ 175 covers some of that gap, and the A220 is eating into the upper end of the market. But right now, there are still well over four hundred CRJ900s flying worldwide, many of them serving routes that nothing else can reach profitably. They are not perfect. They were never going to be. They just do the job.
