maintenance/aircraft analysis

English Boards Community Support
1

Hi,

 I have been trying to use old and used aircrafts to expand my network (although I started with new aircrafts) for the past month or so. It seems like I kind of dug a hole for my airline :) Maintenance costs are through the roof and even though with a larger network I am able to fill up flights, I'm still not making any profit as maintenance costs are eating it all up. So I thought of taking a hard look at who are the primary offenders.

I am trying to do the following:

1) understand how the maintenance cost is calculated and try to optimize those parameters

2) create a chart of profit/loss per aircraft - being able to import the flights data and the bank account (for the maintenance charges) would let me do this in Excel, but I don't see any data import feature

3) calculate approx maintenance on example routes for future purchases (I think I was able to do something like this a couple of years ago)

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Ivan

2

Are you talking about your airline on Otto? You CANNOT run 9 maintenance categories with old aircraft. My personal suggestion is using less than 4 types of maintenance categories if you want to run old aircraft. If your fleet age is really high, like what happen to your case, keep it as 3 categories to avoid any additional 15% on maintenance. Sometimes making the profit is just between using one fewer type of aircraft or not.

3

Also the type of maintenance contractor makes a lot of difference. Believe it or not but the difference in total maintenance cost can be as little as 50% (or double) depending on your point of view.

4

Thanks guys, I did not know about this maintenance category thing. I have started cancelling leases and planning to replace aircrafts to reduce my maintenance categories.