Fleet Age

[MattDell]

How is fleet age factored into this game?

-Matt

[Curse]

Pax prefer newer aircraft. But until the aircraft is ~20 years old, the difference is very small.

Also an old average aircraft fleet will decrease your CI respectively you must spend more money for the same CI value/rise.

[swiftus27]

and old planes are tremendously more expensive to C & D check.

[Jona L.]

and old planes are tremendously more expensive to C & D check.

not only those, also A&B cost immense sums (e.g. later the A-check costs more, than on comparable new a/c the B-check [B742 (15yr) A-check is as much a B772 (new) B-check])

[Maarten Otto]

And still... In my experience pax is happy with 23 year old metal.

[GDK]

Newer planes better figure at your 'fleet age'. Consequently, it makes you feel better everytime you look at a fleet age of 1 or 2 rather than 20.

[lunchbox]

It matters a whole bunch in JA2, especially if you are flying 10 yr old propliners as opposed to shiny new jets.  Everytime a new competitor flies one of my routes with a jet, my load factor would start to tank.  That and some supstandard plane management lead me to bankrupt.

[Curse]

It matters a whole bunch in JA2, especially if you are flying 10 yr old propliners as opposed to shiny new jets.  Everytime a new competitor flies one of my routes with a jet, my load factor would start to tank.  That and some supstandard plane management lead me to bankrupt.

But this is basically to the higher speed (=shorter travel time) of jets, not because of their age.

[GDK]

Agree with curse. It was 'jet'. Not fleet age.

[JumboShrimp]

It would be nice if these things were somehow quantified.

older A/C vs newer
faster jet vs. slower turbo prop
higher frequency vs. lower
higher CI vs. lower CI
higher RI vs. lower RI
seating comfort
time of day

I guess it is obvious that if you offer better of the above options, it will improve the demand.  But it would be nice to have the difference quantified somehow.  In another online game that I played (Travian), pretty much everything was quantified.  So I had a bunch of spreadsheets to optimize things.

It would be nice to see some formulas...

[Sigma]

Spreadsheets make things zero fun not to mention unrealistic.  There's no magical spreadsheets in reality that will tell you precisely if you do this and that and your competitor does X and Y you'll magically get 45.7% of the traffic.

If you want to know what works best, just try it out.  The one downside to that is that it favors experience in the game, which I'm not entirely a fan of, but that's why I try to be so free with sharing my knowledge/experience when people ask questions.

Besides, there's enough complaining about the way things works now.  If it was transparent it'd be a million times worse.

[JumboShrimp]

You can learn things by experimenting, but experimenting is costly.

Suppose I want to know:  What if I spend spend what it takes to get CI of 100.  How much difference will that make competing vs. airline B?

Well, 100 millions later, and potentially ruined game, I will get the answer, start the next game in 3 months real life with that knowledge.  I don't think that's the best system.

Curse said:

But this is basically to the higher speed (=shorter travel time) of jets, not because of their age.

How much difference does it really make?  Enough to justify replacing a fleet of Dash-8 Q400 with the new fancy regional jets that just came on market (in ATB).  Now, suppose I want to follow that advice.  But that would be a billion dollar experiment, and potentially a ruined game.

[Curse]

Always think you are that guy who must do everything.

Do you think it is bad to fly from London to Amsterdam in a prop and the flight lasts 5 Minutes longer than in a jet?

And do you really want to fly from Los Angeles to New York in a prop with a tech stop at a regional airport even the US Air Force didn't know it exists? And the flight lasts 8 hours more than a B737 will need - without a tech stop.


At least you must think about one thing;
can you pay the fuel costs for those regional jets? Maybe it is clever to lose 3 to 4 points LF but only need one third fuel.


I know you are a experienced and good player, Jumbo, but I will still answer the question. Maybe some unexperienced player reads this.
The difference is enough if you can use a jet that offers more seats than your prop and if there is not this much competition you need the more frequency.
On most routes up to 700nm props are a good alternative to jets. If it is a Dash8-Q400, you can use it much further than those 700nm. And if there is no competition you can use every crappy aircraft you can get your hands on 

[Sigma]

Suppose I want to know:  What if I spend spend what it takes to get CI of 100.  How much difference will that make competing vs. airline B?

Well, 100 millions later, and potentially ruined game, I will get the answer, start the next game in 3 months real life with that knowledge.  I don't think that's the best system.

That's the way real-life is too, ya know.

No one really knows how effective a marketing plan to boost your "CI" in real-life is going to be or if it even will be at all.  They just think it might be effective based on whatever studies they've done with their focus groups, surveys, etc (here we call that asking around on the Forum for insight into effectiveness).  It's only after actually doing it do they really know for sure.  Real-life is littered with expensive marketing plans that blew up in the faces of the company's conducting them.

Unlike real-life a game works on formulas.  If you knew the formula you'd have a "crystal ball" into the future and would know precisely whether it was worth it or not.