The best way to Profit?

[717-200]

Hey everyone, I was just wondering what might be some of the ways, other than rasing ticket prices, to make a "more than average" amount of money post
flight.

I'm operating an A/C that only gets about 700-800nm range and it guzzles fuel like crazy, so, I was just hoping there was a way to make it possible to
own a decent long(er) range aircraft sooner.
~Thanks

[olseric]

Fly with same city pairs often. More people will be on your flight if you serve the airport frequently.

Remember that with with respect to available seats on airline routes, there is a "break even" point - Passenger Revenue = Cost of Flight.
Your goal is to have enough passengers to surpass that and enter the "profit realm" by filling what are essentially "free seats."

[SWAFO]

You can always set the income multiplier HIGH if you'd like

[AKLupine]

Climb like a home-sick Angel to a higher cruising altitude and shave a few pounds of fuel burn. Try going a little slower too, even .02M will save
you a few pounds in fuel. Change the destination to take advantage of winds aloft or change the starting airport if the destination is a MUST
Dunno what you're flying, but if you have the cash you might think of getting a new plane

[SaVas]

Instead of raising your ticket prices in economy or business, make your airline a VIP airline and set your prices to "good" change your
aircraft payload to VIP seating (might be unrealistic)

[MobilePCPilot]

Hi all,

I work for a real aircraft charter so I have some real rules of thumb to fallow to maximize your profits.

Make your company a low cost one. This is a fact of life; it's very hard to make a buck in this business. But make all of your seats into VIP
ones. You may be low cost but you give great service. And your seats will be more full.

Ok now onto aircraft choice...

Making money is about one thing and one thing only.

Payload. People are buying pounds in the plane (aka seats) and fuel (range) to get there.

I'll cover the later first. A real life rule of thumb is when you double the amount of engines it takes 2.5 times the fuel to get where you are
going. This is for any size aircraft. And the market is wise to this. Look at the popularity of the 206, Beaver, Pilatus PC-12, ... onto all of the
newer airline jets. The big jets started out with 4 engines, then 3, now 2 great big efficent very high bypass fans.

So when you are looking for a plane pay attention to the payload. The Beaver is great for this. Off the top of my head it has 1100lb payload
and a range of 800nm. But it has no autopilot so the Cessna 206 is a great second choice; it can be full payload (?800lbs?) and fuel and
go 800nm. These two are great for the beginning pilot. After you get a turboprop rating you can jump up to a Grand Caravan or my favorate
the Pilatus PC-12. I fly the PC-12 regularly with 6pax 390lb of baggage for 1800-2000nm and burn about 380gal of fuel.

Next comes the big twin turboprops. The Beech 1900 comes to mind. I don't know about regional jets. But when you buy that first airliner I would go for something with two big engines.

Now to operations...

Always, always, always, run your engines at max range setting. You'll burn the least gas and have the flexibility to speed up if you are running late because of weather or atc.

The second thing is always fly at the best altitutde for your engines and winds aloft. You eather need a good pilot operating handbook or a fuel flow gauge to find the best altitude for your engines. (the gns-430xp has a great fuel page for this). Active sky is a great add-on for getting winds aloft info for flight planning.

lastly have enough fuel on board to have a 2 hour reserve and no more. This is enough for any atc / weather delays.

anybody have anyother ideas?

Got to run...

-Todd Giencke



Post Edited ( 12-20-05 16:20 )

[bdlong]

Todd, you have offered some very good ideas that I support. Let me add on to what you have said from personal experience:

VIP seating. I discovered this pretty quickly I set all of the seats to VIP, charged a fair rate and checked to see how many passengers were
willing to pay. Exit the program, increase ticket prices by a small margin and try again. After several tries you will find the maximum amount you
can charge and still have a good payload. This does depend upon your reputation and how often you have flown out of that particular airport.

Fly as high as you can considering the wind. The normal rule is the jet stream is from West to East: flying towards the East, fly to your maximum
altitude. Flying to the West, you will probably be from 5000 - 10000 feet lower since winds are higher at the higher altitudes. This isn't always
true with MSFS though. I have had times where the wind speed remained constant from Fl190 - Fl350. More recently, I have set the wind manually
according to what I feel it should be and from information that I have obtained:

http://www.usairnet.com/cgi-bin/Winds/Aloft.cgi

As mentioned, reduce your throttle. I prefer 65% since I am usually reducing my speed by less than 10% but lowing my fuel burn by as much as 20% as
compaired to 90% throttle.

[jboweruk]

You don't say what aircraft you are using, but if you are small and starting out like me, go for the biggest you can afford, If it's between a
Baron and a Bonanza, go with the Bonanza, it burns less gas and takes the same ammount of pax. Once you can afford it get something
with more seats, my next step here was the Stationair, due to it's capacity. Then step up slowly to bigger and better craft, our biggest is a
Dakota now, a fully restored WWII jobbie, takes 30 pax max and usually between 22 and 26 depending on where I am, she's on a fixed
route between KGEG and KSEA and usually earns me in the region of half a million when flown on this route. As said by others, go VIP
all seats, it's the quickest way to make a decent profit, only allow Economy pax on as you begin to get above a 50 seater. By then you'll be
making enough to not worry too much.

If you're already running an airliner and not making much then I would definitely consider more VIP seats, don't set your cost too high as
that's the biggest put off going for pax. Keep it reasonably low till your reputation climbs, I would go for low pricing till you hit at least 80%
then move up a little at a time, perhaps increase your value every 3 flights or so by one notch, by the time you are up to good/normal
pricing your rep will be high enough to stand it and people will still flock to your airline. Keep to certain runs as suggested, that also
brings in more passengers, good regular routes, one suggestion that won't help you make a profit so much is to database your flights
(Excel is good enough for this) Keep track of which airports each craft serves, that way you can also start tracking times, indirectly this will
help as you will instantly be able to see which airports your fleet is going in/out of, and which planes you own. I'm extreme here as I have
each seperate hub DB'd and the tail numbers as well as what kind of run it is, some of my planes are loose cannons picking up runs
with cargo where they can and serving anywhere and everywhere, while others such as the DC3 are on regular routes.

[717-200]

Thanks everyone for your helpfull hints!

The aircraft I fly (since you guys were wondering) is an Aero Commander 500, it seated 7 and with a full tank could carry about 180lbs
cargo. Turns out, that, that aircraft was the cause of my companys misfortune. So, In the past few hours, I've sold that aircraft and got more than
I paid for it . Right now I have about $850,000 or so (would be more...but a negitive multi digit number was in the bank...) and I'm looking
in on a muchly overused DC-3. I figure I'll get the same milage but with 4x the pax, Hopefully I'll be doing a lot better.

Thanks you guys!

[Sovek]

oh the DC-3 is one of the best planes in the sim, except in turbluent weather it can be hard to control, so beware. it can also climb to about 18,000+
ft, its fun to fly. Get the DC-3, it helps.

[Jetflyer]

One word: Airbus A380.

[scandahl]

The dc-3 is my favorite choise too. Just remember that this propliner is not pressurized, so don't go too high in it.

Cheers,
David

[jboweruk]

Agreed, it's a sweet plane.

[717-200]

Jetflyer wrote:
One word: Airbus A380.

If only I had the money....

[Scott]

Cargo is where the bucks are....
My FedEx DC-10 Cargo jet rakes in the $$. So I can get pax credit pts and feedback I added 4 VIP seats.