When you reconfigure the plane, i.E. reduce/increase the number of business seating, it would be great to reuse the seats from the current configuration, instead of paying once more for all seats.
I mean, I have a plane with 160 economy seats in economy class, and 16 business basic in business class. I see that business is always underbooked with average of 8-10 per flight, and want to replace 6 business seats with 8 or whatever economy seats. Now, I need to make a new cabin config, and when switching, i would need to pay 168 new economy seats and 10 business seats, with the old ones just tossed away.... In reality, you just pay 8 new economy seats, and the 6 business seats would then be stored somewhere, to be reused for the new planes, plus maybe some minimal work cost....
Alright. I think you should have checked out that you have depreciate in flight equipment which means this is a loss for you when you need to reconfigure your seats. This does also apply to the airline in the real world which they pay large amount of money to reconfigure their seats such as AA.
So, depreciation would always be considered as an expense which in another term is drop in value. But, your reconfiguration is not a drop in value but a loss in account for reconfiguration.
Well, I am not too sure about how exactly to count the costs (loss or depreciation), but I just know how it is done in reality.. A contractor's team (or the airline own maintenance staff) is coming in, business seats removed, new economy seats placed, sometimes new, sometimes they looked used before. Some times the interval between all other seat rows needs to be adjusted, and in extreme, a separator bulkhead needs to be moved, but that is much more work i would think, never saw that being done.. I don't know however how the costs are counted.
We have some plans for the whole topic of "seating", among which there are ideas for "real" interior deprecation and seat re-use. But none of it is fleshed out yet. You'll read about it as soon as we have got something noteworthy though.
I found this while I was searching if there is an opportunity to keep used seats for a different a/c or different layout instaed of paying for a whole new cabin every time.
Like someone wrote before, in real life used seats are sold to other companies, refurbished or just stored for cabin modifiations. Also I saw business class seats getting replaced while leaving the eco class untouched and vice versa.
It just doesnt seem right to pay for the whole cabin every time you want to change someting.
Were there any changes made in the game regarding this topic since 2013?
There has, if the system is what is being described on this old post. Now if you are changing cabins you only pay for different seats. So say if I have a 320 with 130 leisure and 20 recliner short haul (completely arbitrary #s btw). If I change it to 120 leisure and 30 rsh i only pay for cost of 10 rsh seats. However if I upgraded to 24 recliner long haul and did not change the config for Y i pay for the 24 rlh seats.
It does not translate across frames, which I guess would be a nice cost upgrade but frankly don’t see how the mechanism would allow for this. Either this or in ASTD
It’s how @jetcruise0707 described it. It changed some years ago. The old system was incredibly stupid. Now it is a tad bit better.
I suggested ages ago to create a cabin pool of used cabins that are in storage from previous aircraft, these stored cabins could later be applied to new aircraft of the same type.