buying aircraft

[simmyd]

Hi,

I have been playing a little while now, and the approach I took was to start with shorthaul using ATR's, and now focus on using 737's on longer routes.
I have built up nearly 70 aircraft, but they are all on lease which means my profit is never very much.
I had been using any profit to expand and open new routes, but I wondered what is the best way to go about buying aircraft and also expanding? is it possible to do both?  Obviously if I could cut out the $4million or so in lease charges every week, my airline would be much more profitable.

Any tips?

[Jps]

If the loan margins are of decent level, you could try taking out loans to buy your aircraft. Works well, if you end up paying the bank less than what you pay for the aircraft's lease. Also, you can buy quite a few aircraft when you always use the last aircraft acquired as a security for the next.

[knobbygb]

Not meaning to hijak your thread Simmyd but it's on the same subject...

Has anyone noticed the inconsistencies in the price you pay when buying an aircraft you've been leasing?  Maybe I'm misunderstanding how it works but It states:

The cost to buy this aircraft is the remaining cost of the leasing period added with the value of the aircraft.

But I've noticed the price is usually quite a bit more.  For example I'm just about to buy-out one of my leased 767's and the costs are as follows (sorry, I should post a screenshot but I'm not sure how):

Value of a/c: 86,686,466
Monthly lease price: 1,107,190
Cost to buy:  88,420,200

So that's some $1.75M more than the current value of the aircraft  and it's only two days to the end of lease.  I could ALMOST understand if, maybe, you had to pay for the whole current month of the lease (even though there's only a couple of days left on it) but the additional amount is a LOT more than it should be surely?

If I buy the aircraft on the last day of the lease surely I should only pay it's value.  And, if there's an additional "fee", shouldn't it be mentioned somewhere? There isn't a fee when you buy an aircraft directly from a broker I don't think.

Sorry - I'm a newbie and probably missing something obvious.

Actually... I was thinking - wouldn't it be good if there were an option to automatically buy an a/c at the end of the lease?  This could be placed in the screen where you can opt to automatically renew the lease or not. Just a thought.

[Jps]

Here's some discussion about it.

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