Are those your only flights for two aircraft? I can DRIVE your schedule in my car. At least, if I had someone to split the driving with, I could. Fly those planes, man! With short hops like these, you should squeeze 3 or 4 or 5 of them into a day on your Airbus, not to mention the Britten Norman. If San Jose is closed at night, then run a red-eye flight to New Orleans or Minneapolis or someplace that leaves 5 minutes before the airport closes and returns right when it opens.
And fly every route every day, except for one five-hour trip (like probably your LAX run) that you run Sunday through Friday. Use that time on Saturday for your A-check. (Saturday seems to be the lowest-demand day on 95% of routes.)
Long story short, you want every plane in the air all day, all night, every day, except for five hours on Saturday when it's getting its A-check. Even if that means you run a flight to Fresno or Bakersfield or Eureka to fill up your last three-hour slot, keep the plane in the air.
About that Vegas flight: Why is it losing money? Vegas is a popular destination. If you've got competition, squeeze them out. Drop your fares to $59 or $49 or even $39 for a month (a game month, not a real month). Run a route-specific ad campaign at the same time. Yeah, you'll lose money on the flight that month, but you'll draw the customers off the other airlines and your LF will go through the roof. When you hit 90%, start hiking the fare, but little by little. Raise it $5, wait for the LF to level off, raise it $5 again. It may take you a couple of real days to break even, but you keep hiking the fare in tiny increments and you'll eventually be making money.
If you can, get rid of the puddle jumper. Focus on one airframe and one engine until you've got 10 planes in your fleet. You can find plenty of talk on this forum about a thing called "fleet commonality." Basically, it's cheaper to operate two Airbus A320s with Rolls-Royce engines (or whatever) than it is to operate one A320 and a Britten Norman, or a Boeing, or a Dash-8, or whatever. Besides, the puddle jumpers tend to turn crappy profits on this game, at least in my experience.
If you're stuck with the plane, you'll just have to cram as many people on it as many times a day as you possibly can. Look for every airport within the max range of that plane, and fly it there. Even if the demand is 2 passengers a day. For the overnight, try to find a decent-sized airport that's open 24 hours, and run a second leg out of there.
Anyway, there's a few ideas to get you started. Good luck. Running an airline ain't as easy as folks think. :-)
Topic: Money Making (Read 1638 times)
