Embraer Revisited. . . My Bad

Well it seems that in my haste to wrap up the regional jets, I skipped Embraer's other line of regionals, the ERJs. Although certainly less impressive than their E-Jet relatives, the ERJ 145 family of aircraft is nevertheless an important member of the global regional fleet.

The ERJ 135/140/145 are very small turbofan powered regionals that actually fill the niche below the Bombardier CRJ100/200 that was mentioned in the previous post. The 145 family was developed starting with the largest version, the ERJ 145. It first flew in 1995 (in its final design; it originally flew in 1989 but was deemed unsatisfactory and was redesigned) with a passenger capacity of 50. As a side-note that I found interesting, the ERJ 145 was designed from Embraer's turboprop, the EMB 120. Although the ERJ 145 that first flew in 1995 was quite different, it shares the same seating arrangement, range, and T-tail arrangement. To my knowledge, it is rare for a turbofan/jet aircraft to be derived from an existant turboprop airframe (please correct me if I'm wrong). The ERJ 140 variant seats 44, while the 135 seats 37.

Seeing as the both versions have at least 95% commonality with the ERJ 145, with the biggest visible difference being the shortened fuselages, telling these apart from one another is very difficult. To me, attempting to pick apart aircraft that have less than a 15 person capacity difference across three models is pointless. Instead, I'll just describe how to tell the ERJs apart from their closest lookalikes, the CRJs.

As you can see above, the ERJs have very, almost comically long noses, which taper entirely from top to bottom. Both these characteristics are exaggerated compared to the CRJs. The other easy way to tell them apart are the ERJs' engines. All ERJs have Rolls-Royce Allison AE3007 engines, which are entirely encased by the bypass air nozzles (the white casing around the engine in the picture above). That is quite different on the CRJs that have the rear portion of the engines, namely the combustion chamber and the turbine, exposed.

Currently there are a total of 697 ERJ 145 variants in service. The airline that I most associate with the ERJs is American Eagle Airlines which operates 200, as they use a ERJ 145 to connect to the American Airlines hub in Chicago from Rochester, such as the one below at O'Hare:

But the overall largest operator is ExpressJet with 244 ERJ 145s. ExpressJet operates under the banners of both Continental Express and United Express.