Lessons Learned- A Guide To Newcomers

[Seattle]

Even better, 5/15/132 on a 737-400 or just 150/5 

[DSimm626]

One the best ways to ensure your aircraft is making $$$ asap is to work the thing...just as the airlines do in real life.

An aircraft sitting on the ground is a waste of $$$.

Schedule the aircraft to work from 6am - 5am the next day (with the red eye not available 1 day a week for the 'A' check).

It doesn't matter what your aircraft costs to run a month, if it is sitting on the ground, it is losing. Even if you schedule a red-eye flight and it only makes $2000-, making $$$ is better than the aircraft sitting on the ground costing.

As a newbie to AirwaySim(a little over 2 weeks now) I found that this advice is so true. To me in real life leaving an airport at 2 am isn't very good but my CRJ100's make at least $2,000 a flight doing this. That is better than nothing at all. Daytime flights usually average $9500-10,000.

[Iceman66]

I'm a newbie myself, started around the same time as DSimm626 in fact, and I am operating out of a smaller regional airport (KTRI/TRI) as Astral Sea Airlines. I'm finding LOTS of trouble making a profit with my 50-seaters (Dash-8-200/300's), but making bank with my MD-81 despite its age.
The one thing I have found to be advantageous in flying out of a regional is, with the airport closed late at night, I can schedule my A checks without any route conflicts. I set the checks for 00:00-0500 and the planes depart between 0530-0600 for their first leg. B and C checks, obviously, are still going to create issues because they take a plane out of service for at least a whole day, but at least the weekly maintenance doesn't mess me up.
(I have also found the truth in what an earlier post mentioned about having many destinations very close: I was frankly amazed at how many airports of various sizes, including more than one major one, were within 300-400 nm of TRI. I guess it's very strategically located after all, even if it is horribly under-utilized in the real world.)
I do have one n00b question though. Where do we report errors in airport info? The data is really amazingly accurate, but I noticed the closing time for KTRI is an hour earlier ingame than in real life (which occasionally messes with scheduling late-evening flights...). Is there a specific thread or do I need to PM an Admin or...?

[DSimm626]

I don't know the range for your MD-81 but since your airport is closed at a certain time at night have you looked into a red eye out west? It could be flying out west and back while your airport is closed.

On your 50 seaters try making a route to say ATL(or other large airport) then another regional airport and back to ATL to TRI. Bad thing is you'll be competing with me on alot of those routes because I have a lot of CRJ100's and F70's going from ATL to regional airports. I could be bribed to leave a route so you can try and learn how to do it before Game 1 ends in a week. Let me know if you want to try it and I'll suggest a good route for you.
David

[Iceman66]

I don't think the MD81 can make a trip quite that long unless maybe a multi-leg with a refuel somewhere around Reno but that is a great idea, thanks... I've already restarted the final time since I last posted and nixed the Dash-8's in favor of ERJ-145's that can make more trips per day. They're making some profit but I'm still losing tons of money each day.
I may try the multi-leg like you suggested, the game ends really soon but at this point it still may have a chance at digging me out of the hole some. Unfortunately I'm too far in the red to offer a decent bribe, so I'll just have to bear the competition and pray it works LOL. I'll try to give you a much better run for your money next game, when I can actually get in from the start .

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[Monk Xion]

I would like to add my wisdom also.

Airports

Heres the lowdown on airports. The bigger the airport, the more passangers/ business that you will have. But, you will have a huge amount of competiotion. Not just from carriers that are also based at you airport, but from carriers flying into your city.

I've always stayed away from airports like London-Heathrow, Amsterdam, Atlanta, etc. The airports that I have based at are as follows:

Beta 1 (1997-2008ish):

Tokyo- Haneda: I had Shorts 330s that made no money. I was stupid in not choosing Narita, because I wanted to operate International flights.

Phoenix: After BKing in Tokyo, I moved my operations to here. I had a 767 operationg LH to London via Newark. Lost money. BK again.

Phoenix (again): After my first try here, I leased a TU-154M and did domestic routes. I dont remember how far I got, but I had a good airline. Then the Russian built aircraft struck back.

Geneva -Conitrin: Based here for a little bit. Had good success, then got bord with airline. Bk again.

London City: DING DING DING! A winner for me! I based here around 2002 or so, when airlines started to go BK. Got some Dash-8-400Qs cheap, later operated ERJ-190s from airlines that went BK.

So, I learned a lot from that game.

Beta 2 (1967-1977):

I disliked this beta alot. There was much less demand then before.

Geneva -Conitrin: Had a great airline here, dismantled it after there was no new demand.

Oslo - Gardenmoren: (Yes, we know that this airport didnt open until the 1990s. We had people based in Narita and Osaka too =p) After a carrier (who tried to operate EVERY SINGLE type of plane avaliable) went BK, I moved in. It was ok. Not spectacular. BKed airline once the Quick Beta opened.

Quick Beta (1992-1995):

Zurich: Made a huge airline here. Sadly, game cut it short.

Welcome to AirwaySim #1:

Honululu: Based here for a a little bit. Dassaults and L-1011s killed me. Bked, made new airline witht MD-80s. Bked after competition became too much.

Ft. Lauderdale: Went here. Made a great airline! ACCIDENTALLY Bked it. Whoops...

Welcome to AirwaySim #3:

London City: Based here for whole game. Bked before game end.

[ekaneti]

Hi:

Im new.  I am a long time player of Airlinesimulation (since 2003). Does length of haul make a difference? Are longer flights more of less profitable on average?

Thanks

[Jps]

I'd say that having 1 long route flown once a day is better than having 2 daily routes. Especially, if the route is long enough so that the 1st leg (from A to B) lasts over night, and the leg back (B to A) is flown in daylight. This way, you maximize the time your aircraft is in the air, thus giving you more money, since when the airplane is on ground, all it does is loses money (service, parking fees (ok, not used here) etc.). So I usually like to start with as big an aircraft as possible (777, MD-11 or so) and put it on a route that leaves like 9pm and arrives at the destination at 7am, and then flies back home from 9-11 am (depending on the turn around time) until 3pm, and then has A check from 4 to 9pm on one day. This way, the plane spends only some 5 hours/day on the ground, and flies 19h.

The times in the example are just made from my head, but you get the idea of having a night flight, and the airplane in the air as much as possible.

Of course, you can make profit on shorter routes, too, and sometimes even more, but sometimes less. It totally depends on the routes and aircraft. So there really is no exact rule as which is better, long or short haul. Short haul is good especially in Japan, where you can have more than 1 daily flight with a 747 in a route less than 600nm.

[NorgeFly]

I am running two airlines, one completely short haul and one almost all short haul and it is possible to make quite decent profits. You need to choose you aircraft carefully and fit in as many flights in a day as possible. I dont operate any flights between midnight and 6am (as in Europe short haul pretty much comes to a halt overnight and I like to be realistic) and I try to fit in at least 6 sectors and preferably 8. This generally brings in far more revenue than doing two 4 longer sectors.

There are lots of secondary airports in Europe (not just the obvious LHR, AMS, FRA etc) that can support a pretty good short haul airline! It's challenging but I enjoy it

[RisteMakedonski]

You need to have the right planes on the right routes. I was based in Stuttgart and was running out of close routes and had many CRJ's. I put them on flights to Turkey and northern Africa, making my a/c's only go on two routes a day. They were barely making profits.

[NorgeFly]

You need to have the right planes on the right routes. I was based in Stuttgart and was running out of close routes and had many CRJ's. I put them on flights to Turkey and northern Africa, making my a/c's only go on two routes a day. They were barely making profits.

Yeah I agree 100%. If you have something like the BAe146-300 or Fokker100 in your fleet you can send these a little further and still do well (Eg. I have a 146-300 doing FCO-MAN-MXP and back and it makes around $60,000) but the 50 seat range aircraft really need to be doing 4 returns on short routes to get the best out of them. Short haul is definately a challenge, but I think thats why I like it.

[Kammola]

Planning is the key. I have an example what you should not do. My airline expanded pretty well, even so much that I decided to get some MD11's. Leased one then another, so that finally I had about 10. All went well and I found some decent long-haul routes, for which I had to fly to another hub first, because my home town had zero overseas demand. But worse times were coming, while all the big companies had orders for bigger planes. When those appeared on routes, my load factors started to lower, whatever I did. At some poin C-checks made me loan money and the tailspin had started. Too late I understood that getting rid of those big planes would be the only chance. The trouble was I had long-time leases.

So my lesson learned after the bankrupty is - plan the lease times carefully.

[norske25]

I am not sure if this is built into the game or not, but when I started my airline (for the third time) I tried to keep my one plane to the same two or three airports until I made enough money to expand. I think this affects staffing and may be cheaper for you to focus on one route a few times a day that has a large demand, rather than run your plane to seven different cities and have to pay for staffing at all airports. This helped me get my airline going in the early stages, especially because I started half way though the game when fuel prices and competition was tough.

[samomuransky]

One thing which works for me is: NEVER take a loan until you making very good profit. Taking loan to lease new aircraft at the start (sometimes in first game day) ruined me many times. Wait with leasing new aircrafts until you get money for that by flying. This really helped me

[masoniclight]

I am still the Bankrupt king around here (11 times now) so I am still learning and still trying.. not in a game currently (Ill wait 'til the next round of games) but there will be success at some point... or me just having as much fun as I can before I go belly up haha.. if it wasn't so funny and stupid I'd be in a bad mood, but what the heck.. its only a game.. a great one at that.. I'll get there someday.

[razzbc]

well, you have to spend money to make money, and the games dont give you much money to spend at the start... i'm currently playing three different games, and have borrowed a lot of money in all of them... i suppose it may bite me in the ass eventually, but I've used the money to lease planes that are making me huge profits each week... as long as you're well into the green even after making your loan payments, I think it's ok...

[ReedME]

I BK all the time, but I'm Finally making some money in 'Rise of the Modern Airliners'

The way I did this was locate in Vegas, and use the lack of competition to my advantage, which gave me access to 1k plus seats per day on the KPHX - KLAS route. High frequencies and low fares send the RI soaring and allow you to make good money, right now I have 2 737-300's operating the KLAS-KPHX route, both making huge profits, each with about 5 flights into phoenix every day

[connorc17]

I know this is a really nooby question probably and there's probably another thread for a question like this, but...

How do I create a route not from my home base? Or open a new hub/focus city?

[soulbuyer]

I do not know if this question has been asked somewhere else or not:

I have started my airline in O'hare Intl, but realized, after, that there are no open slots.

How do I change my base of operations airport?

[Sundaypilot]

How do I change my base of operations airport?

If you haven't been there over 3 game months, then Relocate (page Office > Rebrand/Relocate Airline):

You can relocate your airline to another home base if you have started the game less than three months ago in game time. Relocation means moving your home base to another city and re-starting all operations from the start. All your routes must be closed but the current aircraft fleet and staff are automatically moved to the new location. Relocation takes two weeks and costs a significant sum of money.