Tell me how you use your long-haul planes!

English Boards General
1

I’ve started to due a bit long-haul, after reaching almost 50 planes. (Europe-USA)

I am flying with 757-200 IGW’s, and having a nice profit on around 35-40% margin. But most of my planes, are on 300-500% maintenance - and I would love to exploit those last %. Could any of you come wih a great example, of what you do? It’s not profitable for me, to fly to LHR, CDG or AMS - just in case, you would suggest that.

How do you guys maximize the usage?

2

You have two options:

  1. Add a short haul flight to the schedule. I usually have a daily long haul flight + 3-4 a week short haul flight (how ever many my maintenance ratio allows).

  2. Configure an all long haul route with some breaks in the middle. This would mean not having the same flight number daily…

For example:

Monday. LHR - JFK, flight arrives at JFK at 10am. Leaves at 1pm. When the flight arrives back into LHR, add a new flight that departs a few hours after. You should be able to fit in most flights like this and still get a good maintenence ratio. The only downside is, you have a slightly crazy (albeit managable) time table.

Having said that, you are already paying the lease, so it is a ‘sunk cost’ which you will incurr regardless. You are also already paying for flight and cabin crew. If you can make a small loss on your short haul route, that is less than your lease expense (you can compare these two in the flight details page for each flight), then actually you are making a gross profit on the flight.

Hope that helps.

Saad

3

If you’re already making a 35-40% profit margin on your flights, why do you want to kill yourself over lowering down maintenance? I think you shouldn’t bother with it(in my opinion)

4

long-range routes have 2 variantes of flightplan:

as mentioned add a short route to fill the gap

the other variant is the difficult one:

you need 7 aircrafts for one run a week

example for a hub in ams:

AMS-JFK, AMS-BEY, AMS-IAD, AMS-ORD, AMS-MAD

with a 2-hour break after 2 flights you get a full flightplan and everyday other route

then you fill the other six aircrafts with this plan day after day

are you following me?

regards