There is no magic formula for a profitable airline business model, says Lim Kim Hai, head of Australia's Regional Express (Rex). Rather, success comes from focusing on a raft of minor details, and constantly searching for new ways to do them better.

The personal animosity generated by US Airways' very public advances toward AMR Corp.'s American Airlines division and the union furor that preceded that action have obscured something very important that is about to occur in the U.S. airline industry: Regardless of who is involved, more consolidation is coming, and it will likely bring an end to US Airways.

Ask Laurie Price, director of aviation strategy at the Mott McDonald consultancy, what an ideal European regional airline looks like and he will say: It should be well-established in niche markets with a significant share of public service obligation (PSO) routes. And it should have a strong relationship with one of the region's major airlines as a complement for the base network.

Air India is scheduled to take delivery in late May or early June of the first of 27 Boeing 787s it has on order, followed about a month later by receipt of the first 787 to roll off a new assembly line in South Carolina. But who will fly the new jets when they arrive?

Malaysia Airlines' (MAS) turboprop carrier, Firefly, began operations in April 2007 and since then has experienced double-digit growth year-on-year. It also prides itself on having higher profit margins than the global industry average.

Here is a regional airline with Chinese characteristics—one that is growing so fast that it is rapidly picking up mainline characteristics. In just five years, the company has evolved from operating Dornier 328s to Embraer ERJ 145s, then Embraer 190s and now Airbus A320s. By mid-decade it plans to take the remarkably non-regional step of introducing widebodies for intercontinental services. A freight subsidiary is also in the works.

With projected fleet growth and expected pilot retirements, it is inevitable there will be a shortage of crews to fill commercial flight decks. It is just a question of when and where, with some regions already feeling the pinch. So training provider CAE is getting ready to respond to demand by acquiring the flight-school, type-rating and crew-sourcing capacity of Oxford Aviation Academy (OAA) of Canada, arguably the leading name in ab-initio pilot training.

In recent years, it has been fairly easy to paint the regional airline industry with a broad brush: it is dominated by North America and perpetually struggling. But while U.S. regionals continue to be battered by bankruptcies and squeezed by major carriers, there is a bright side to the industry. In other parts of the world, regionals such as Wideroe and Rex are growing and even prospering. In this package of articles, Aviation Week's global team looks at carriers in four different markets to see why they are succeeding—or not succeeding, in the case of the U.S.