Spend a short time reading any airline news site and the largest carriers in the United States will become familiar names. Airlines generate a lot of news and planes hurtling through the air at close to the speed of sound are inherently exciting. No wonder journalists love to write about them.
American Airlines, Delta and United are the three most obvious. Southwest, JetBlue, Alaska and others will soon become apparent. Breeze, Allegiant, Sun Country and others are a bit more obscure.
But what about Commute Air, Envoy Air and Republic Airways? Old hands in America probably know exactly who these are. But you could work in old-world aviation for 40 years and never come across their names.
Yet these airlines are substantial operations. Commute Air operates nearly 2,000 flights a week. Envoy Air has just under 7,000. Republic Airways aircraft carry passengers nearly 8,000 times a week.
So who are these obscure airline brands and why have we never heard of them? The answer is found by asking a different question: who are they flying for? Read on…
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This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!
I took a week of schedule data for 25 regional and commuter airlines in the United States. I also included the 12 mainline airlines, to make a total of 37 airlines in the study.
The week in question was 2-Nov to 8-Nov 2026, which is probably a normal-ish off-peak week without public holidays or close proximity to major travel seasons.
The 25 airlines are shown in the table below:
The ten airlines highlighted in salmon are particularly interesting. Together they operate 55,140 flights (28.9%) of all the 190,626 scheduled flights operated by airlines with any US Air Operator Certificate in our data.
Their share of capacity is somewhat lower at 14.7% of seats – 3.8 million out of 25.7 million. Their flights are comparatively short too – only 6.4% of Available Seat Miles (ASM) are operated by these airlines.
The chart below shows how they compare with each other in terms of number of flights.
SkyWest is by far the largest, with 18,324 flights. Republic follows in second place, Envoy in third and Endeavor in fourth with 7,919, 6,964 and 6,293 flights respectively. Charts plotting seats and ASM show similar patterns.
To understand who these airlines really are, we need to look at the OAG schedule data more closely. Their operating codes are as presented in the table earlier. But look at the marketing codes and a different picture emerges, as shown in the table below:
Only GoJet Airlines is operating and marketing flights itself, and there are only seven of those out of 1,968 flown by the carrier. All the others are operated on behalf of major carriers.
It turns out that a whopping 28.9% of all flights operated by US-certified airlines are by regional airlines on behalf of four major carriers.
