While the "aircraft type evaluation" tool often shows wrong results for all indirect costs (due to sometimes incorrectly given "flights per week")
it gives you exact results for your settings on all direct expenses (maintenance is correctly calculated by the tool as direct!)
Once you’ve selected a maint contractor, the evaluation tool calculates the costs for maint based on the contractor you chose. Didn’t we have that already in another thread, btw?
If you want to get the expected maint costs for your desired route/airframe combo, simply run the tool with your data - don’t forget to select the correct airframe age!
Maintenance [maint] costs are always the same for a given aircraft type/route combo and only vary with the actual age of the used airframe.
Costs for maint go up with airframe age.
For 0-5 years, costs are the same, "as new".
Starting from >5 years, costs for maint gradually increase and have roughly doubled at an airframe age of 20 years.
I need to contradict. Maint can be a big deal though most seem to ignore it.
If you weigh up the cost savings for an older plane (lease at a lower rate) vs. a new one, you might be surprised.
Just as a quick example from my actual fleet (I contracted an expensive maint to do some more returns a week):
A330-300, new vs. 15 years old, operating the same route and number of flights:
The weekly maint costs for the 15 years old exceed the new one’s by 181,608$ (!!)
This is roughly the amount I save due to a cheaper lease, but I still have the worse flight rating.
I’ve just worked out that my Embraer 120s are costing me over $110,000 per week in maintenance EACH! That’s about 5 times the leasing rate! This is using the default Avia Technik. Obviously I’d like to switch contractors - but which one? What exactly is the downside of taking a lower efficiency and quality?
Yes, the EMB-120 is brutal at maint. I once had a few 120-freigters but maint (and fuel burn) were so over the top I wasn’t able to operate them at any useful profit.
If you switch to a cheaper maint contractor your aircraft’s maint ratio might drop below 100% and you need to give up some flights in order to get it back over 100%. This is only a real issue if leasing costs are high. For cheaply leased or owned aircraft this is far less an issue.
ok I’ve switched to another contractor - next question - when does the change take effect? So far looking at the new bookings I’ve seen no real change in the price.