A/B Check Strategy

[LemonButt]

I'm still a newb getting my bearings in the demo game, but plan on jumping into the beginner's game starting in a few days.  My question is, what is the best strategy/philosophy on A/B checks?  I have been flying red eyes leaving my base at 2200 or so and arriving from the west coast around 5-600.  For most of my planes, I've got the A/B checks scheduled for 600-1100 or 700-1200 in that time range as slots tend to be most expensive in the morning.  I've also staggered the checks so that I have 7 planes getting checks on 7 different days and keeping the revenues flowing each day.  If you schedule every A/B check at the same time/date, do you incur extra staff charges?

Are there any strategies better than others?

[DHillMSP]

I can't speak to the staff charges, but logically, staggering the checks so that only a certain number of aircraft are out of commission at any one time for their B check makes sense.  That's how I set it up for my fleet and it seems to work well.

[d2031k]

I tend to schedule them all on saturday or sunday and generally overnight, as this is when the loads are the lowest.  You get your biggest profits from the flights at peak times, hence why the slots are more expensive.  Pax will want to fly at these peak hours and so if you schedule a check over one of them, you're missing out on the money-maker flights

Dave

[Sigma]

Small planes aren't as effected by time of day of the flight as large planes (because pax greatly prefer small planes in this game).  So it isn't quite as important when you schedule them for.  Slot costs can be a larger percentage of your costs when your plane is small, so it may be worth avoiding them in your instance.  But I don't either method is appreciably beneficial as the slot costs are a fairly minimal overall portion of ones costs.

As for the day -- it doesn't really matter that much.  The plane is still out of service X hours of the total year for maintenance checks.  It doesn't appreciably matter what day it happens to be.  Overall there's less demand on Saturdays, so if you've got seven planes on a route, every one of which can't fly it once per week, it may be best to put 3 into check on Saturday, 2 on Sunday, and 1 each on Tuesday and Monday.  If you go ahead and always do your maintenances on a particular day, you may be leaving pax on the ground on a Saturday.  So just stagger it out.  But, overall, you won't be making a really significant impact no matter what you choose to do because the plane is always going to spend the same number of hours on the ground no matter what.

[Unbornio]

I try to run them on all the days. So that when I have 7 aircraft, their night flights can be filled by the 8th aircraft.

[Riger]

It becomes very difficult to micro manage to this degree, unless you are going to have a small fleet and lots of (home) time.

[DHillMSP]

It becomes very difficult to micro manage to this degree, unless you are going to have a small fleet and lots of (home) time.

Agreed - I tried this out during my demo game.  It didn't work out so well from a time perspective, plus taking an aircraft offline for a full day was detrimental to my profits.  Then I learned the wonders of flying the aircraft every day and letting the maintenance system pull them out of service as needed.

I really don't let the pax load dictate - basically, as I build my fleet, each plane gets the next day on the calendar.  First one gets Sunday, the next Monday, etc.  Theoretically should balance things out when the B checks come up at the end of a month.