Sort of a written let's play (will contain many screenshots)

[roddi]

Thank you, Ron! I couldn't keep my fingers away from AS. And it's so much fun again. :)

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Welcome to season 2! Canada!

It’s easy to fear this market. As I said, I never tried Canada.

1. How are you supposed to get those IATA codes into your head? So many Y. Why Y? Does anybody know why Canada got almost all IATA codes with Y as first letter? I could have googled it, but ... ok, now I’m curious ... I found this short text, don’t know if that’s accurate, but it sounds ok to me (external link: http://www.canadianbucketlist.com/why-the-y-in-canadian-airport-codes/).

2. Also there is the threat of the vastness of land. Canada is so huge and has only a few small dots with major airports. Well, as I started planning my flights I realized Canada actually isn’t that huge. If you’ve ever build an airline in Russia and scheduled some flights from Moscow into Siberia or to the Pacific Ocean then nothing else ever will be huge again, I guess. Surprisingly Canada feels somewhat small. Vancouver to Toronto fits twice into Russia. On the other hand there are another 2000km from Toronto to St John’s, maybe Canada is still huge. You can see, I haven’t figured it out yet.

3. Then there are 277 airports in Canada. Most of them only have one or two bars of demand and many of these have landing strips the size of a towel. I don’t know yet how to manage this situation, might become the first try for me with LETs.

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[ChristianPalsson]

Canada is a very hard market to penetrate if you are an underdog. Have a friend who tried but as soon as he expanded at a place he was quickly driven out by the strong competitor. And most of these battle grounds where just 6 bar airports. In my opinion Canada is a one player market as it cant fit two big players similar to Indonesia and Brazil. In my opinion only EU, US, China and sort of Russia can fit more than one player. What you can do is focus on trans Atlantic as well as a lot of trans continental and domestic. Try to connect as many of these small places as you can but do not waste your time with LETs, you shouldn't need anything smaller than an ATR42. 

[TravellingSalesman]

If you ignore the initial Y(s) it sort of makes sense: (Y)VR for Vancouver, (YY)C for Calgary, (Y)EG for Edmonton, (Y)WG for Winnipeg, (Y)OW for Ottawa.

And of course (YY)Z for Toronto and (Y)UL for Montreal. Er... Hm. ;)

Agree with CBE that there's no point messing around with the tiny arctic airports. A few strategies I found useful:

- use YYZ and/or YUL as transatlantic hubs. Preferably YYZ because of stronger demand to US and no night ban, but usually fewer slots depending on competition.

- use YWG (Winnipeg), YQR (Regina) or YXE (Saskatoon) as a kind of mid-country hub. There is still quite a bit of demand domestically so you could connect most BC/AB/Prairies airports with most QC/ON/Maritimes destinations.

- YVR is actually ideally located for transpac routes: if you look at gcmap.com you will see that most US-East Asia routes more or less fly over Vancouver. So with a bit of sensible scheduling you can have a lot of NA-Asia traffic through there. YYC (Calgary) would also work in a pinch if YVR is already taken by somebody else.

- You can essentially schedule as many YVR-YYZ, YYZ-YUL/YOW (Ottawa) and YUL-YHZ (Halifax) as you like, there is always demand. Also quite a lot of YYZ-East Coast US (NYC, WAS, BOS).

- Regional routes mostly work by province. I.e. connect the 1/2-bar Ontario airports to Toronto, Québec to Montréal etc. Again, with sensible scheduling that will add quite a bit of connection traffic.

[roddi]

@CBE: Thanks for your reminder to not overvalue the LET.

@TravellingSalesman: Thank you for this description of the market. That is very reassuring because it's almost exactly what I figured for Canada. I just have to make it work and have a bit of luck with the competition.

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S02E02 - First two weekend closings

Two weeks have already passed by. This time I already had a framework that gives me good ratings. So I didn't had to mess around that much. The numbers reflect that with positive earnings from the beginning.

I might be a little more patient here because I believe more in this market than I did with Egypt. Out of the experience with small old planes in Egypt I started this time with Embraer 195. There were no cheap old ATR 72, no cheap enough CR7, so I took the E95 for normal used prices. After the comment from CBE I took another good look at the performance of the different types of ATR for the runways under 1500m. Because there are quite a few runways with 1066m or 1067m the older ATR won't do any good work. But the modern ones are able to fly there if I put good seats in it. That means I will use ATR 72-600 where I can and if they are too big I still have the option to go to ATR 42-600. Because these are modern planes it will take time to build a fleet and a network with them. That also means you can watch a more normal and less messy growth of an airline.

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[roddi]

Ok, let’s face the reality here. Obviously I’m not very interested in this Canadian company. It would be the side project forever and my priorities lie with my mainline. Also I got an extra boost to concentrate on this mainline yesterday. That means I’ll close down season 2 right now.

Season 2 is dead, long live season 3!

Iset Airways - It was named after the Iset River which is running through Ekaterinburg (SVX). It started operation on August 13, 2016, little over a year ago. I just hit the 1 mio. pax/week.

(1) Luck was my friend here, but I had to wait for it to come at least a few months, maybe half a year. I don’t know for sure. The time I had to wait I was flying on Ellinikon in Algeria. After a while I started searching for some nice opportunity somewhere. So I screened through the servers and the countries, I compared between different servers how many pax were carried to spot an underserved market. I found Russia on Gatow. Both Moscow airports with 9 bars were taken, on both of them sat an airline with a big hub. But there was still 20-30% of slots left. Nobody was flying to the far east, except for the neighbors from Kazakhstan. That market situation was my first lucky point.

(2) I started in SVX and quickly got flights from there into both SVO and DME. Here I was very lucky a second time, I got a bunch of old AT7 for around 6k or 7k, also there were very old A320 in the market, some of them with leasing rates in the low five figures.

(3) I watched my competitors closely. The one in SVO wasn’t online for a long time. Three months after my start SVO was empty over night, number one got deleted. That was my third lucky moment. From there I could try to become the biggest airline in Russia and I built my way there.

(4) Now DME got empty over night. I didn’t expected that. At the same moment I accomplished a goal of mine, I carried over 1 mio. pax last week. Now 500k pax need a new carrier and I have already ordered 49 used A320 from the market. Now I have work to do!

Don’t even think about getting your foot into DME ;).

From now on when I write I will write inspired by Iset Airways and about the life as a CEO of a company with more than 500 planes so anybody can see the inefficiency possible in big airlines :P.

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[roddi]

Iset Airways

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S03E02 - Bus routes

First something painful.

It hurts just by looking at it, doesn’t it? :o :) Because I hate it so much I go extra miles to avoid scheduling anything other than 7/7 all in the exact same slot. If I can’t find slots in LHR for example that fit together so I get my plane in or out at my hub in exactly one slot window then I won’t take them. That means, they have to lie all in a window of 15 minutes for me to get the connection to LED. I take them spread out in LHR if nothing else is possible but insist on only one slot row at my own hub for as long as possible. And I only schedule daily. If there aren’t enough people for one daily flight then I’m very sorry for them, but they have to find some other means of transportation.

Now just some quick examples of my high frequency flight plans, first to SVO, second to DME. The route LED-SVO allows for this nice even distribution over the day. However it costs efficiency. I’m willing to pay this price for the ability to manage the route easily. This structure doesn’t work on LED-DME because the turnaround in DME is longer and DME lies in the south of Moscow while SVO lies in the north and is closer to LED. It’s still an easy system. Both structures make it easy to avoid scheduling flights at almost the same time.

This is one example of planned inefficiency to make the airline manageable for me. It allows me to easily up- or downgrade the capacity of the big routes. And don’t be fooled by the 120% maintenance ratio to DME, there are 2 hours lost between two runs that can’t be used for maintenance. If I would schedule all flights tightly together I might get something around 170% or so.

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[roddi]

Iset Airways

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S03E03 - Scheduling around

How do you get a daily flight under one flight number if the flight is too long to return inside one day plus maintenance?

Answer: You use more than one plane. Below you can see how this looks like in the flight plan.

Why am I writing this? Well, I wanted the one SIN flight out of one pack of seven planes into another pack. Just for a better overview inside my airline. I was wondering how to switch this flight around. After asking in the forums I didn’t got the quick fix I had hoped I oversaw, but I got the suggestion to look again into the “Scheduling” interface that I never used before. That was the winner, it was pretty easy that way. And because I haven’t written here for months I thought why not show everybody who might be interested.

Here comes a short look into what I did:

I wanted this flight into this slot, every day:

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I wrote down these planes on paper before me because that is the pack with the room in the flight plan. Be careful with the right order, I started with 416 here.

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Then I selected the flight number I wanted to switch, and after that did the following for all days and then for the return flight also:

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It is pretty easy, you choose the aircraft, then mark the day, then click on the green apply button, you select the next aircraft of your pack (it clears your check mark automatically), mark the next day, apply and so on. Before you select the aircraft you can select your fleet on the top to narrow down the available options (the green highlight in the second picture).

Of course I checked my flight plans if everything went right. Now I will watch out for the already booked flights in the old pack, one plane might strand in SIN because I robbed its schedule of its return flight. On the new pack its not that important because the new pack flies only to SIN. Everything went well there, the last booked flight is the return to LED. If its ok there it should be okay in the new pack as well.

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[Banff]

A little tip. 

I rename the planes temporarily. 

Plane 1: 111

Plane 2: 222 

And so on. Then you don’t have to type the different plane registrations 49 time. Makes it easier and faster. 

[ianmanson]

Just to maybe expand on a point which I think you've run with and maybe make life a bit easier.

In fleet management if I have a fleet of 7 aircraft doing the same pattern, I use a note like "A" on those 7, and "B" on the next 7 on another pattern.

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This means no matter what registrations you get, you can sort these aircraft quickly. If I am going to play with their schedule I then select those 7 and move them to another fleet (such as WIP)

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Then when I go into scheduling I have all 7 in one fleet which I just select

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Might streamline the process a little.

[roddi]

@Banff: Thanks for that tip, that makes it even more comfortable:

@ianmanson: Good point, and yes, I'm doing that already, looks like this on my side:

Red: ordered by registration not all planes of one group are in line with their group, group 1 and 3 are mixed. My planes get a group number and a number for the order inside the group.

Green: I tested the tip given by Banff