As a new start-up, I am just wondering what is your opinion about Russian planes? Using the performance tool, I found Tu-204/214 had a better performance than 320 or 738 in my most important routes. But I find those Russian planes are not quiet popular…just wondering why…reputation?
I’m not sure on AS but I do know that in real life it takes a billion dollars to maintain them but other than that they are pretty good. ( in my opinion )
Depends what you need them to do.
An-148 and the Sukhois are perfectly serviceable and basically comparable to their competitors. You’ll wait a while for a new one and fuel consumption is fairly high, but you’ll make up for it in reduced acquisition costs. A wash - though both have somewhat longer legs than their size equivalents from Bombardier/Embraer (to the point of being just about capable of transatlantic flights) so that’s useful.
An-140 and Il-114 are workable. More expensive to run than DH8/ATR but again, cheaper to acquire.
The Tu-204 family is…difficult. The larger ones are ‘ok’, but carry no freight (so the comparison is a little misleading - you’re potentially missing out on a bunch of income compared to A321/739). The -300 is optimised for range rather than efficiency and fuel consumption is frighteningly high for what it is. They all need fairly long runways relative to their competitors - fine in Russia, but can be a problem elsewhere! The selling point here is that you can get a dedicated freighter version - really a fairly bad aircraft…but absent the ability to order conversions it fills a niche.
Il-96 actually uses fuel as waterjet propulsion rather than burning it, so…no, don’t go there.
All the ‘specialist’ aircraft (Il-76, An-124, An-72) are terrible - the reasons for their existence aren’t really represented in a world where all freight can be split into 100kg containers, and they mostly operate outside of ‘traditional’ airline patterns - AS doesn’t really do ‘We broke a 120 ton generator in the middle of Zambia and we’ll pay you a million bucks to fly out a spare’ which is the sort of thing the operators of these aircraft make their money from.
All the aircraft suffer from the fact that there’s little intra-family scaling - you can have a 50 seat CRJ or a 100 seat CRJ, but you can only have a 100 seat SU9, so if you need multiple sizes of aircraft you’re liable to take a maintenance hit. Again, that may or may not be a problem for you. Theoretically there should eventually be a stretch of the 148 and a shrink of the SSJ, but it’ll probably be a while before we see those.
You need to consider how many ‘dense’ routes you will fly. You also need to consider your competition and what they are flying.
Remember, if the competition is flying a321s on a thin route, you will kill them using superjet 3 times per day. It comes down to frequency. However, if you are based in hong kong for example, you don’t have the slots to stuff around, you need big jets to get enough pax through your hub.
If you want to have a ‘hub’ network, eg frankfurt, you can use big jets to make the connections. If you are based in beirut, you will need to start with a smaller aircraft as you will not have enough demand to fill a large one to start to build a hub net work. Once you get more and more flights, you add capacity across the network to build your hub.
hope that makes sense