Realistic Utilization?

Hello,

I have an airline in India called Lotus Airways and I'm trying to keep it as realistic as possible. Right now, I am keeping my aircraft with around 20 hours of downtime per week. Can I lower it to 10-15 and still be considered realistic?

Thanks

If you take off routes that have a high amount of flights per aircraft on it will lower the hours, purchasing new aircraft and using barely using them will lower the average hours. Ideally a realistic carrier has 11-13 hours of utilisation 

In real life, aircraft utilization would really vary from the types of routes you make, also the aircraft type you use.

 

Regional airlines that use small turboprops or regional jets like to fly only during they day since the airports they serve are small, and may close operations during the night. They cram all their flights in that 12hr window of daylight. Plus they make flights frequently so much of the aircraft's working hours is during turnaround. This type of airline would get an average daily utilization of 8-10hrs.

 

Low cost airlines also prefer flying during the day, but it is not a strict rule. LCCs are good with turnarounds. Some can turn around a plane in 25mins or less. With some night flights and quick turnarounds, I would estimate LCCs to have an average daily utilization of 10-12hrs.

 

I would put Full service carriers take more time to turnaround their planes since there's more fancy stuff to load. Also, unlike LCCs, FSCs do more variety in flight lengths:

 

Short-haul. Flights less than 6hrs. Some of them don't fly at night either so, 9-11hrs utilization.

 

Medium-haul. Flights 6-10hrs. Now this is a gold mine for airlines. If an aircraft can fly a 10hr flight back and fourth, it could be capable of flying 20hrs/day! But this rarely happens. Also maintenance factored in, 12-18hrs utilization.

 

Long-haul. Flights more than 10hrs. This gets complicated since an aircraft would take more than 24 hours to do a flight and return, so it might have to do a short-haul flight on the second day. I would say it varies so much so 10-16hrs utilization.

http://www.airasia.c...hat-is-lcc.page

Everytime someone asks about utilisation, I'd post this.

FSC around 8, LCC around 12. However, I'd apply this to short haul planes as there are more cycles, hence making the airplane wear more than a longhaul plane.

If you look at CX's Chairman Letter and info to shareholders, their aircraft utilisation is around 12-13 hours.

While not a strict adherent to utils myself, I try to keep to 12 for short haul and 14-16 for LH.

http://www.airasia.c...hat-is-lcc.page

Everytime someone asks about utilisation, I'd post this.

FSC around 8, LCC around 12. However, I'd apply this to short haul planes as there are more cycles, hence making the airplane wear more than a longhaul plane.

If you look at CX's Chairman Letter and info to shareholders, their aircraft utilisation is around 12-13 hours.

While not a strict adherent to utils myself, I try to keep to 12 for short haul and 14-16 for LH.

 

An Indonesia AirAsia, once, in my hometown (Bandung), leave at 5 am, and come back home at 1 am. I still remember a jet roaring the sky before sunrise, because I live near the airport. And also a jet doing an approach after midnight. Both are the same aircraft, the same registration code. And that happened every day, with no holiday. I even made that approaching sound as a sign that I need to stop playing AE because it's midnight already. That's a 20 hours of utilization. Which is what we are allowed to practice in AE. 

 

So actually, to utilize an aircraft 20 hours a day is considered realistic. Cause it is possible. To utilize your aircraft 24 hours a day, that's what we called unrealistic. But if you want to utilize your aircraft similar to most of real world airlines aircraft's utilization, then leaving 56 hours a week unused is what you need to do. 

 

I don't get it. Why do these people abuse the word realistic? It made me feel like a bad person just because I utilized my aircraft to maximum usage. Like I'm doing a crime. -____-

 

We really need to ask the game developer to shorten the utilization to 12 hours a day so this "realistic topic" would never come out again. 

An Indonesia AirAsia, once, in my hometown (Bandung), leave at 5 am, and come back home at 1 am. I still remember a jet roaring the sky before sunrise, because I live near the airport. And also a jet doing an approach after midnight. Both are the same aircraft, the same registration code. And that happened every day, with no holiday. I even made that approaching sound as a sign that I need to stop playing AE because it's midnight already. That's a 20 hours of utilization. Which is what we are allowed to practice in AE. 

 

So actually, to utilize an aircraft 20 hours a day is considered realistic. Cause it is possible. To utilize your aircraft 24 hours a day, that's what we called unrealistic. But if you want to utilize your aircraft similar to most of real world airlines aircraft's utilization, then leaving 56 hours a week unused is what you need to do. 

 

I don't get it. Why do these people abuse the word realistic? It made me feel like a bad person just because I utilized my aircraft to maximum usage. Like I'm doing a crime. -____-

 

We really need to ask the game developer to shorten the utilization to 12 hours a day so this "realistic topic" would never come out again. 

 

20 hours a day is why Norwegian had sooooo bad delays (some 2-3 days late) when they had only a few 787s and they were getting stuck

An Indonesia AirAsia, once, in my hometown (Bandung), leave at 5 am, and come back home at 1 am. I still remember a jet roaring the sky before sunrise, because I live near the airport. And also a jet doing an approach after midnight. Both are the same aircraft, the same registration code. And that happened every day, with no holiday. I even made that approaching sound as a sign that I need to stop playing AE because it's midnight already. That's a 20 hours of utilization. Which is what we are allowed to practice in AE.

So actually, to utilize an aircraft 20 hours a day is considered realistic. Cause it is possible. To utilize your aircraft 24 hours a day, that's what we called unrealistic. But if you want to utilize your aircraft similar to most of real world airlines aircraft's utilization, then leaving 56 hours a week unused is what you need to do.

I don't get it. Why do these people abuse the word realistic? It made me feel like a bad person just because I utilized my aircraft to maximum usage. Like I'm doing a crime. -____-

We really need to ask the game developer to shorten the utilization to 12 hours a day so this "realistic topic" would never come out again.

That's putting some serious strain on the airframe doing that... You gotta bear in mind that each departure and arrival is taking the aircraft up to altitude, and when you're at altitude you're pressurizing the cabin, which presses against the airframe. People don't do lower utilizations for the benefit of crew or whatever, they do it to keep the airframe healthy. If you run your planes 24 hours a day nonstop, the maintenance costs would probably negate any additional profit you make while at the same time increasing the risk of airframe failure substantially.

This doesn't even mention the problems of running the engines at max throttle for much longer than intended. Or the wear and tear on the brakes (or every other component on the aircraft). Or just plain safety if Air Asia Indonesia aren't even pulling planes for maintenance at least once a year. Seems terribly dangerous.

TL;DR it's an engineering problem not a moral one

 

Short-haul. Flights less than 6hrs. Some of them don't fly at night either so, 9-11hrs utilization.

 

Medium-haul. Flights 6-10hrs. Now this is a gold mine for airlines. If an aircraft can fly a 10hr flight back and fourth, it could be capable of flying 20hrs/day! But this rarely happens. Also maintenance factored in, 12-18hrs utilization.

 

Long-haul. Flights more than 10hrs. This gets complicated since an aircraft would take more than 24 hours to do a flight and return, so it might have to do a short-haul flight on the second day. I would say it varies so much so 10-16hrs utilization.

So when you say there would be however many hours utilization, is that how many I should have left each week or what my utilization per day would be?

 

Thanks to everyone once again

So when you say there would be however many hours utilization, is that how many I should have left each week or what my utilization per day would be?

 

Thanks to everyone once again

 

70 hours remaining translates to 12 hours daily utilization, that's my rule of thumb. 

 

 

That's putting some serious strain on the airframe doing that... You gotta bear in mind that each departure and arrival is taking the aircraft up to altitude, and when you're at altitude you're pressurizing the cabin, which presses against the airframe. People don't do lower utilizations for the benefit of crew or whatever, they do it to keep the airframe healthy. If you run your planes 24 hours a day nonstop, the maintenance costs would probably negate any additional profit you make while at the same time increasing the risk of airframe failure substantially.

This doesn't even mention the problems of running the engines at max throttle for much longer than intended. Or the wear and tear on the brakes (or every other component on the aircraft). Or just plain safety if Air Asia Indonesia aren't even pulling planes for maintenance at least once a year. Seems terribly dangerous.

TL;DR it's an engineering problem not a moral one

 

Exactly. If people here were so concerned about "20 hours a day is unrealistic", let's ask the game developer to lower the aircraft usage per day, rather than accusing people who run 20 hours a day on the game as ruining the realm. I personally agree that it is exhausting to hear an aircraft doing domestic or regional flights for 20 hours in a day (which might translate to 8-12 flights). I couldn't imagine that this particular bird turn on her engine for 20 hours straight and go to sleep for only 4 hours (to do maintenance). But then, I couldn't compete with my competitor if I leave 70 hours a day while others leave only 7 minutes. LOL.

 

70 hours remaining translates to 12 hours daily utilization, that's my rule of thumb. 

 

70 hours remaining translate to 10 hours daily in Airline Empires. -___-

We are only allowed to fly 140 hours a week.

If you take 70 hours, we only have 70 hours to fly.

And 70 hours divided by 7 days is 10 hours.

Ah apologies my math was wrong

 

And rather than a hard limit (which will only serve to piss off players), I'd suggest that AE basically makes it economically infeasible to run planes for long periods at a time through drastically increased maintenance costs. This could also apply as aircraft age, helping prevent players from running Constellations and CL-44s until 2020 because even if the spares market is there the laws of entropy say that those systems will degrade over time (and thus cost more to operate). It'd be more realistic that way since there's actually little to no real life government regulation preventing airlines from running their planes as much as possible. 

Some Long-haul-low-cost-carriers like Air Asia X makes huge profits on flights that last 10hrs. If they do this back and fourth everyday, their utilization is 20hrs/day! So 20hr util is possible and realistic if conditions are right. But as I said is rare. The new AE should have varying arriving/departing demands throughout the hours of the day and timetabling which includes maintenance. Then we will see more realistic utilization even from the spamiest players, despite allowing 20hr utilization.

Some Long-haul-low-cost-carriers like Air Asia X makes huge profits on flights that last 10hrs. If they do this back and fourth everyday, their utilization is 20hrs/day! So 20hr util is possible and realistic if conditions are right. But as I said is rare. 

It's not rare, it's impossible, they can schedule those runs for a single plane and keep them running for days, but not weeks or months, sooner or later planes get to week and month long maintenance, so a schedule for an aircraft doesn't really make an average for a fleet. I hope you can understand that you oversimplified things.

 

My "realistic" airlines had around 12 h exploitation for short-liners and up to 15 for mid/long haul, because AE's months have 24 days so I'm multiplying realistic expected usage by a factor of ~0.78, which gets 12 to around 9.5 and 15 to ~11.5, I'd say that might be more or less realistic.