The catch I've found with a pure wave system is you sacrifice keeping the planes in the air to keep to the wave. Losing a flight or two a day can seriously impact your bottom line. And because it is nearly impossible to time match short/med haul lines it becomes increasingly difficult to stay in the wave. If you can fill the plane then keeping it in the air is always preferable in my mind. And adding that extra couple of flights a week may mean all the difference.
Well yes, you might get them to fly more, but if you can't fill them, you will lose money on those "additional" flights.
In the end you have to die one death, and it is a trade-off. In general, you have a more robust and low Agex-resilience with a good wave system. You get a lower utilization, but your planes will have a higher load. But there is no one absolute correct answer. It all depends.
You do have to sacrifice aircraft utilisation, I run with 6 waves, and I do have aircraft doing very little. But I attract far more connections, which in a game of connections is king I believe. By running a strict system it is exceedingly hard for competitors to compete, and also means that out of a relatively small airport you can create large airlines. The other advantage is when it comes to upscaling or downscaling aircraft, it is relatively simple. I have 6 waves, therefore 6 slots, each (short haul) flight will either take up 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, or 2.5 slots (.5 is with a maintenance break). The aim is to have each aircraft utilised for a total of 5 slots per day. My schedules generally don't change for a change of aircraft, just it is simply slipped into the schedule of an under utilised aircraft.
I think it´s most important to keep schedules as simple as possible! The longer I´ve been playing Airlinesim, the simplier my structures have become. Normally every plane shuttles between two airports only, sometimes it connects two destinations to one hub, or one destination to two different hubs. Exceptions are only very long routes or regions with wery low demand.
If you need waves to fill your planes, then do so. But wherever passenger demand is huge enough to fill point-point flights, fly point-point! This makes your airline not only cheaper and more attractive, you also get simplier schedules, so you can react faster if demand or competition changes.
One thing I learned is to always leave a 15 min gap between flights (instead of true back to back). If the airport gets full and you still want to squeeze in a new flight, you can then reshuffle some of your existing flights to free up that one slot you need.
Yes, you loose a bit in productivity, but in the longer run it’s worth it. And if you end up with a 96% schedule, you can still make an exception or two to get it above 100%.
When scheduling long range, you can have a single plane fly one daily roundtrip on routes up to ~8.000km. Anything beyond that cannot be flown 7x/week by a single plane unless you accept a maintenance ratio below 100%.
So the alternative would be to combine several flight numbers to result in a daily flight. Some airlines seem to manage to keep that under the same flightnumber. Can you split one flight number on two or more planes?
If you schedule an aircraft to fly on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday to fly for example Paris - Hong Kong and return the same day you need only 2 flight numbers (1 for CDG-HKG, 1 for HKG-CDG). Then, if you get another aircraft you can choose to use an existing flight number (instead of creating a new one) and tick the boxes according to the days you haven't scheduled on the first aircraft. That way you can fly those slightly longer routes still daily with only 2 flight numbers using 2 aircraft.
Thanks for the replies. However, I checked other airlines flight schedules on Quimby and discovered that some operate a daily 13.000km flight on just ONE flight number. How would that be possible?
Thanks for the replies. However, I checked other airlines flight schedules on Quimby and discovered that some operate a daily 13.000km flight on just ONE flight number. How would that be possible?
You can assign flight numbers to different planes.
Thanks for the replies. However, I checked other airlines flight schedules on Quimby and discovered that some operate a daily 13.000km flight on just ONE flight number. How would that be possible?
As matth said. He has one flight per plane per week and has in total 7 planes with the same flight number.
There's only one problem with this "7-aircraft-method": it is not very flexible. It is hard to exchange destinations if loads are not sufficient.
Though it kind of is as long as you find the slots. If my daily Brussels flights from Jakarta dont do that well I might exchange three to Amsterdam flights, I could also have Frankfurt, London, Manchester, Paris, Vienna and Munich without any problem. In a worst case scenario I could also do shorter flights such as Istanbul which won't be a horrible waste of time.