Maintenance ratio

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1

Hi

I have made a schedule that covers a week. No flight for 3.5 hours every night. Maint ratio is 166%. I always understood that as long as the maint is not below 100% all is good.

I have 66% ratio left over to spend right. So i make 2 short night flights. One on tuesday and one on saturday. Maintenance is 103% after i planned this.

Is that a good thing ??? The condition drops to 66% and the flight ratings ac condition drops to 3 bars red. The days after it gets back to good levels until my seccond night flight.

Is this behaviour impacting the pax numbers that are flying with me ?

Thanks in advance

2

Is that a good thing to go 103%? In my case, yes.

I some times go until 100.2% and still got green maintenance percentage. (Yellow at night, but the next morning returns to green.)

Is it affecting the pax numbers? Yes. 

But maybe you should check your maintenance provider as well. Going to 103% with bad maintenance provider is a joke.

3

So whats the best provider ? Using the african one since it LOOKS the best.

However i notice the condition can take up to 2 days of maintenance to be recovered fully again … then my next night flight breaks it down to 66% again. Never red condition always yellow . With 2 night flights ( fully booked and earning money ) the maintenance stays above 100%

I am wondering if this is good practice or if i should not allow the condition to go that low.

Thanks for the replies

4

The higher the maintenance quality, the slower the condition of the aircraft deteriorates. I can get away with three maintenance breaks per week without affecting flight ratings too much.

5

Soooo Helvetic is the best option for maintenance ?

6

It depends. In some cases yes, in some cases no. And even in cases where it’s not the best option, it’s a good decent option. Much better than many others.

7

I don't remember which one is the default, but switching to African Maintenance Systems allowed me to fit more flights per plane. With the default provider, I'd have smaller maintenance ratio, which would be lower than 100%, and condition of my airplanes stays generally on 90%-95%

8

Yes but African is very expensive… It’s the same thing as Amethist. When you have 1000 aircraft those 25% over 100 don’t make much difference in revenue and scheduling, but saving 50% on a maintenance bill does… It is also bad idea to have more than 3 categories with African, a piece of cake with two others.

9

Is it really 50%? Currently, I have only 21 planes and 3 categories so my budget doesn't really complain

10

Yes there are maintenance providers where you can save 50% versus African

11

Btw could anyone actually say if "lousy" price is cheaper or more expensive than "excellent"? It's pretty confusing imo

12

Well, an excellent price is cheaper than a lousy price. This makes perfect sense if you look at Servizio da Luigi. It has poor quality and poor efficiency, the only way it could compensate for that is in price. As it's price is excellent this must mean excellent=cheap. If you then look at the two service providers that are the most excellent in quality or efficiency (African Maintenance Systems, Helvetic Maintenance and QuickTech Engineering) they all have lousy or at best average pricing which must then mean that it's more expensive.

I do agree that the words chosen for price could have better been or something similar to:

Cheapest (Lousy)

Cheap (Poor)

Average (Average)

Expensive (Good)

Most expensive (Excellent)

13

Thanks for the clarification. My logic was that something African might be cheap and something European (Servizio da Luigi) might be pretty expensive but I wasn't sure.

14

Well the only thing you can find out best maintenance provider is to test. In reality things are not the same as on paper. Sometimes what seems to be the worst choice on paper might actually be the best choice in reality.

I can tell what I would do: I would set up a holding for each maintenance provider, order the same aircraft models, new, from factory fly the same routes at the same time (pricing and profile don’t matter) and watch the maintenance cost and condition for 2 or 3 weeks. Then I would reset every holding, and repeat everything for next 2 or 3 weeks, but with old aircraft, and keep observing. Yes it will cost quite a few credits but you can find out yourself what’s actually best for you, and more, because what’s best under some circumstances is not best under another circumstances.