Exodus

Currently October 1995 on R-delta, so little under 6 game years have passed and I just crossed the $1,000,000,000 daily operating profit marker. Have about 3,200 aircraft flying and another 900 on order. So yes, it's definitely possible to reach.

A way to make it slightly more realistic would be to track aircraft flight hours and (at least financially) make aircraft require C- and D-checks. That way it would become much more costly to operate aircraft 20 hours per week especially as they get older. Given increased costs, airlines would then have a choice to either keep paying heavily for that maintenance or invest in a new aircraft.

An automated scrapping is a no-go for me, no matter how old the aircraft is ! Airlines should always have the choice on how they manage their fleet.

Moreover, given that the demand for 2nd hand goods fluctuates that would also involve that the depreciation rate would fluctuate from one year to another, which seems strange from the accounting perspective.

 

In real life, these fluctuations are minor. A good aircraft will have pretty constant depreciation rate. The major influences for actual fluctuations are for instance the availability of newer, more modern aircraft. Like how in real life the 737-400 depreciation rate almost doubled when 737-800's became available second hand. 

 

This depreciation has nothing to do with the taxes a company pays. Yes, the company can financially write off the aircraft in terms of taxes, where they add part of the aircrafts purchasing cost to their expenses each year. However, the depreciation rate in AE purely revolves around the residual value of the actual airframe over time.

Depreciation is mostly influenced by demand for second hand aircraft.
And just to be clear, depreciation is never linear !

 

Just compare the similarly sized A300 with the Il-86 :

A300 is worth $110,000,000 and will be worth $42,835,773 after 10 years.

That's 38.9% of the new value.

Owning Cost for 10 years : $67,164,227

 

Il-86 is worth $90,000,000 and will be worth $19,917,142 after 10 years.

That's 22.1% of the new value.

Owning Cost for 10 years : $70,082,858

 

The reason for this difference is that there will be a lot more interest for the A300 than for the Il-86.

These numbers of depreciation are based on real life situation, where the demand for a second hand Il-86 is virtually non-existing.

And while you can 't compare AE to real life aviation, the game has always based its data on real life aviation (manufacturers, aircraft types, fuel burn, range, airports, airport traffic, ...).

 

For flying cow, when you correctly want to calculate depreciation, you'll need the following formula :
(new aircraft value) * ( (1 - depreciation rate) ^ (number of years) )
so for Il-86 that would be 90,000,000 * (1-0.14)^20 if you want to see what it's worth after 20 years.

No, it's completely based on aircraft family, there's nothing factoring in the engines.