6 replies to this topic

[Airplanepilot501]

Ok every airline I stated up all went bankrupt because I never make a dollar,I keep losing money.My latest attempt at this grate game I was losing more then $2,000,000! That airline was Trinidad airlines and it was more or less Sucsseful then my first attempts. Can any one help me make money on Airline empires, even have a net prophet of $500,000 not -$2,000,000!! Can any one help me build and airline that can stand the test of time?

[mxax-ai]

1) read one of the popular and better tutorials
2) start in a big(ger) country like the USA or China (or any other, just not a small, "weak" country with small airports)
3) stick with one efficient aircraft family
4) utilise your aircraft as much as possible for the beginning
5) take care to only open profitable routes
6) try to avoid competition

If you're still losing money:

5) cut the salaries to a pretty low figure
6) use a scam ifs
7) fit an extra dense configuration into the aircraft

Things not to do:

1) operating supersonic aircraft
2) buying advertisement
3) opening a hub too early

If you're still losing money, check and repeat steps 3 to 7.

Pesonally, I am wondering how one can NOT make money on AE.

[davedave]

I'm no expert, but I've also found it harder to lose money than make it in this game. Try Open World 2 for your next airline - still plenty of uncontested routes. Pick a relatively minor airport for your base - main routes like LHR-JFK are going to have lots of competition, but minor routes are less heavily saturated. Then find a bunch of cheap old planes (of the same type) on the used market, lease a gate at a handful of other airports near your base, and connect them up with your planes. (Pick the other airports so the routes have no competition.) You want to go with a bit less load than the route's capacity for maximum revenue per plane at the early stages, and then increase the ticket prices to the maximum price that still sells every ticket. 

 

As an example, there are a whole bunch of 10-20 y.o. 737-200advs on the market at the moment in O2. You can lease them for next to nothing per month to start with. POS is a bit full, and TAB a bit small, so although you could make them work, they're not the best starting choices at the moment. IF you try - random pick - SJO, there are any number of empty routes to airports between about 1000 and 2000 miles away, with gates that cost about 30-35k per month. Fill up cheap planes on those routes, and on empty routes between the other airports, and you should have a good base profit to start doing other stuff - although basically you just want more of the same. 

 

As long as you don't add too many different types of planes without having enough of each type to pay the maintenance costs, you ought to be OK. Even gate fees are pretty insignificant if you have fairly profitable routes and reasonably large planes. Even the most expensive gates in the world only cost about 10-15k per slot, if you use them all - that's just $500 per day per flight, and that's not hard to achieve. At the smaller airports the gates cost far less than that, so as long as you have one or two profitable flights into somewhere the gate costs you $5k a month, you'll still be fine.

[Uruk]

I am also having trouble making money but the I usually start in small countries as for hiring leasing old aircraft it was all fine and dandy until igot hit with an obscene maintenance check for my old 707´s

[davedave]

I've found that the extra maintenance cost is mostly balanced out by the decreased lease/depreciation compared to a new plane. In any case, it shouldn't matter. With the 737s mentioned above, for example, the base maintenance cost is 2.25 million a month, and even 20+ year old planes only cost 500k per month each on top of that. Each one ought to be bringing in 3.5-5m per month profit, going by the bunch of old ones I still have in my fleet - I think the higher end's not unrealistic at the start, when it's worth spending more time maximising revenue on a few planes. 

 

The main reason I said to pick old planes is that they're much cheaper, so you can get more of them quicker. As long as each one is making a profit after maintenance and the (usually low) cost of the gates it's using, it makes sense to use planes you can afford more of. In terms of return on capital, they can be much, much more effective. If you start with 7.5m and use it to lease two or three new planes, you might make 150-200k daily profit off each - of course all your monthly costs aren't counted in that. If you can use that money to lease 20 old planes, even if you're only making 100k a day profit off each, you'll still have much more profit coming in to start buying nicer planes with.

[FuturePilot35]

Hi, I'm not actually a very experienced player, but I have an airline that makes about 3m profit from flights. (have not deducted leasing, maintenance etc) My suggestion would be to operate all aircraft from the same family, (mine is A320 - 200) and try to start in less developed countries, and fly routes with less competition with moderate to high demand of about 200 and above for starters. Also, try to pack the schedules of you planes to the extreme and keep adjusting prices of your tickets until it fits nicely. Look at the demand and compare the load factor. Keep reducing the price until the daily pax is higher or the same as the daily demand, or that the load factor is 100%. If the default price already gives you 100% load factor, start to increase, do not let the load factor drop though. Oh, and if there is more than one airport in a city, try for both airports.

[catpaco]

Ok every airline I stated up all went bankrupt because I never make a dollar,I keep losing money.My latest attempt at this grate game I was losing more then $2,000,000! That airline was Trinidad airlines and it was more or less Sucsseful then my first attempts. Can any one help me make money on Airline empires, even have a net prophet of $500,000 not -$2,000,000!! Can any one help me build and airline that can stand the test of time?

I love the Civ Reference