While I would tend to agree, this is far more than luck. Aircraft are consistently sold within only a few months of delivery, and always purchased by China Eastern. This is deliberate.

Money printer go brrrrrr

In R0, the user who owns China Eastern also owns Swiss International Air Lines. 

I noticed that China Eastern consistently had more planes than other airlines, even though they had only started delivery a year or so prior.

A little bit of digging reveals a pattern of Swiss International purchasing and then immediately selling aircraft, which are purchased by China Eastern. I am unable to find a single Swiss International aircraft that was purchased by anyone else, so this is clearly deliberate and the user is keeping track of when Swiss International sells their planes so they can be purchased on the exact day they come on the used market.

Pretty scummy, if you ask me. Only one airline should be allowed per user, per world.

I wasn't aware that having an absurdly massive fleet was against the rules. My apologies, I'll go ahead and close my account once you point out where exactly on the rules page it says I'm doing something forbidden.

For the record, I "whinge" when people very clearly abuse game rule #2, which I'm sure you, as well-versed in the rules as you are, have read before:

 

2. Multiple airlines owned by the same player in a world cannot be used to give an unfair advantage to each other (selling aircraft to each other to get around delivery slot limits, flooding routes together to gain market share, etc).

Here you go.

...Yeah.... dusting them...

I totally do that... Yes...

There was a similar instance a while back where a player made two airlines and was using one of them to feed aircraft to the other. The feeder airline would take delivery of an aircraft and immediately sell it; the parent airline would purchase it. Very much against the rules.

Ha! Sure enough, in R0, there are also a bunch of VC.1 Vikings for sale with PT-6As.

I was scrolling earlier, saw the PT-6 model and thought "What? PT-6? On a plane that old? Huh." and then went about my day.

Turns out it was indeed the same person who modded the 707s. What a coincidence. I'll buy them all and scrap them.

Oh, the irony.

I really can't overstate just how little your opinion means to me.

It seems this person did more than I thought. I'm going through my planes and finding many of them have very wrong engines. Tu-114s with PT-6s for example. Not cool. Cheaters suck.

Oh wow, and a bunch if Il-14s of various flavours with PT-6s too. That's so funny. Scrapped!

...How? What??

Also note that in a world that is in 2008 they already have the A320neo...    

Now that is odd. Which world/airline is this?

The fly-in breakfast at the local airport this year will be a real treat in my new Bonanza. Lmao.

Okay I'm done screwing around now. Time to forget the forbidden knowledge.

It has not been patched.

(S4C) Sandbox World - No Political Restrictions (5 min / day)

 

2 ZA

 

390 1,238 6 3,974 1,226,746 9,766,344

$200,631,492,241

 

That's really interesting. The game has safeguards to prevent ordering aircraft that aren't yet available... at least, it doesn't seem to be possible in the same way that adding different engines is possible.

How strange.

I wonder if Yuxi will read this thread before banning me when he sees all the illegal nonsense I've been up to. It's purely academic, I promise.

Website has been acting up for about a year now with performance slowly degrading. I submitted a bug to the issue tracker with no response -- the game is unplayable for me when I have more than 400 or so aircraft on screen at once. UI elements just stop working.

Not sure if this is a Chrome issue but the game pretty much soft-locks for me after a while. 4-5 minutes to load a single page.

It takes multiple attempts to post on the forums.

Nah. I would if I could do it in bulk, but one at a time? Not worth it.

Might be the same idiot who messed with engines in R0.

The base maintenance cost is 5% of the average aircraft price in that family that you own. So within that family (727, A320, etc) if you have 20 planes priced at $100,000,000 and 20 priced at $120,000,000, your base MX cost would be 5% of $110,000,000 or $5,500,000.

Ongoing maintenance costs are a little more opaque, but per month they are approximately 0.3% of the purchase price of the aircraft times 0.0048 ·A² + 0.002 ·A + 1, where A is the age of the aircraft in years to one decimal place. This means that aircraft maintenance costs increase quadratically with age, so while maintenance costs between a 2 and 3 year old aircraft won't be extreme, a 25 vs 26 year old aircraft can have a big gap in ongoing costs.

In the grand scheme of things, the difference between leasing and buying isn't significant. It's not difficult to make an aircraft profitable.

However, a fleet of 1000 planes making 10% margins vs 30% margins...

If you buy a plane for $100,000,000, you trade $100,000,000 in cash for an asset worth $100,000,000. That asset depreciates, so you must make back enough cash each year to compensate for the depreciation of the aircraft to "break even" in terms of overall valuation.

By leasing instead of buying, you only have to earn back the lease cost per month to "break even". If the cost of the lease is less than the amount by which the aircraft depreciates, you end up making more money overall. 

Looking at the first graph, do I understand correctly that if the depreciation rate of an aircraft is equal or less than 4.5%, it will be cheaper to buy it than to lease it even without a discount? For example, I buy an aircraft in a used market, or I order just one new from the factory.

That is correct. Below 4.5%(ish) the discount is negative, so you pay more than retail price by leasing. 

The trick is to abuse game mechanics, but that's a pretty cheese way of playing the game. I do it because I like the optimization challenge and deep-diving into the numbers of the game.

If you want to run a regular airline (like most people) then a 10-15% margin is perfectly reasonable.