Question on Fuel vs Passengers

[Dasha]

In a direct request to the S.A.M.I. the Zantha Board of Directors would like some explanation on the following.


We all know that the A330 is a fantastic plane on the long haul high demand routes. But what if a company would setup their A330's with a luxury 200 passenger set up. Does this mean the plane uses less fuel and will thus be cheaper to fly? Also, Zantha would like to be able to have a free choice on the amount of cabin crew we deploy.

Obviously the Y: 288, C: 28, F: 8 standard configuration needs 9 cabin crew and a full tank to fly it's full 5000 nautical miles.
If an airline reconfigures it to 200 seats in total, we want to use less than 9 man cabin crew for the future games.

For now the simple question.

If we fly an A330 with 200 seats for 3000 NM, will it use the same costs on fuel as a fully loaded full ranged or is the game model calculating the minimal fuel required for the flight?


The Zantha Managing Directors are hoping for a swift reply of the S.A.M.I.
 
   

[Sami]

The variable fuel consuption vs. actual aircraft weight is not modeled at the moment, although it would be fully possible to make. The system's fuel use calculation is quite realistic (compared it back then with actual real-life airline planning logs etc) as it calculates the fuel usage individually for every flight every day with a certain calculated baseline value & some randomization for daily variation. Adding the payload effect wouldn't be that big a deal there but I've left it out to keep it a bit more simpler as that's not an essential feature.

For the flight attendants, you automatically cannot drop them if you have fewer seats. I don't know about the 330 but A320 at least requires 4 CA's always - no matter how many seats it has (at least in EU area I think).. But the general rule of 1FA/fraction of 50 seats does apply but there are aircraft type related differences. Adding more FA's will be probably coded into the in-flight service feature later on.

[Powi]

I think it would be great to have variable payload included in calculations.

Because at the moment:

I've 2 aircraft of the same type, but different weight variant. One has range of 1500NM and the other has 2000NM.

I've 2 routes. 1500NM and 400NM to assign those aircraft.

OBVIOUSLY I assign the longer route to the aircraft with less range because that's how I get less penalty for flying aircraft less than its max range.

Then I find the 400NM route unprofitable and drop it...

(Ok probably effect is minimal on those short routes, but anyway)

[edobarto]

Here's a general rule about flight attendants number...

As Sami said, it's about one f/a for a certain amount of pax BUT the rule could be simplified as follow: you need a flight attendant for every exit of the a/c. This rule doesn't consider the emergency exit of the a/c as the over wing exits but it's related to the normal exit doors. So, an a/c of the A320 family has usually a complement of 4 or more crew members because they have 4 exit doors. But there are some exceptions.
I know that Alitalia used to fly the B747 Combi (a B747 with a mixed pax/cargo layout) and so the number of f/a was lower than in the usual B742.
Anyway, if you look at the project of the A330-200/300 you'll see that it has 8 emergency doors and this game sets the usual crew as 9 f/a. it means that there is 1 crew member for every exit doors PLUS 1 spare crew member which is usually the "cabin manager/purser", or the chief flight attendant, who's a kind of supervisor.

[freshmore]

some airlines operate more than the minimum flight attendants required i believe, thats why i believe BA can let some go because they have had more than enough in the Boom times we've had so now they will start running flights at the minimum required.

[edobarto]

BA and the other airlines furlough f/a and pilots mainly because they've curtailed their service in the last year.
There's a minimum number for crew member and Sami has implemented probably the lowest of this crew configuration: as for an A330-300 9 f/as is the minimum crew configuration allowed by the JAA and the GCAA. Anyway, just to give you a figure: Emirates and Etihad operate the A330-200 with a cabin crew of 13.