The Pan Lux Concorde Experiment

[Seattle]

This. thread. is. AWESOME!!!

Congratulations on your success! I've never gone near those poisonous jets. Anyway, how did the SFO-NRT route do?

[esquireflyer]

This. thread. is. AWESOME!!!

Congratulations on your success! I've never gone near those poisonous jets. Anyway, how did the SFO-NRT route do?

Thanks!

Profitability has been achieved on SFO-NRT, but only by very narrow margins. I am still playing with the seat configurations on this route to see how to optimize it. It does not help that fuel spiked to its highest-ever prices in JA6 in the middle of my experiment.

But the player who was flooding the route with DC-10s seems to have backed down, which does help. I'm not sure if that's permanent or temporary. To protect my Concorde from further route invasions, I've put on two of my own DC-10s on the route, configured in a "subsonic assist" configuration, with smaller F and C cabins (since the CONC has large ones) and an expanded Y cabin (to carry all the Y pax that can't fit into the CONC's small Y cabin). I hope this will help to make the demand/supply graphs look less "juicy" to potential competitors.

The timetable also shows the speed advantage of the Concorde. Although the Concorde leaves an hour later than my second DC10 departure, and the Concorde takes a 2-hour tech stop in CDB (vs. the DC-10 flying non-stop), it still lands 1 h 45 min before the DC-10 that left SFO before it. I am hoping that this provides a measurable speed bonus (in the eyes of the passengers) in JA7, even though it seems that the pax in JA6 can't tell the difference between flight times or even flight prices, and all they care about is frequency.

[esquireflyer]

A passenger aboard the (game) world's first transpacific Concorde service took these snapshots during our fuel stop, at the scenic Cold Bay airport in Alaska.

(Many thanks to E.G. for the graphic design!)

[pascaly]

Seems legit 

[esquireflyer]

I've tried out an HD Y config as well as a "magic carpet" F/C config. It seems that neither is very effective. Although they make enough to break even or profit on a per-flight basis, they probably won't cover the overhead. The trouble is that with HD Y, I can rarely sell more seats than I would sell on standard Y. When I leave the F and C cabins as they are but change Y to HD, I usually sell the same ~40 Y seats that would also fit in standard config, rather than the max 52 Y in the HD config.

And with magic carpet, I can't fill the extra F and C cabins. I sell about the same F and C seats as if I was carrying a Y cabin (sometimes a little more, but sometimes a little less), and the loss of the Y cabin lowers the profits a lot. There doesn't seem to be a harsh magic carpet penalty however (i.e., it doesn't seem to be lowering the F and C loads below what they would be with a Y cabin onboard), at least not by enough that I can confirm that it's happening systematically and not just a random fluctuation.

It's possible that I could make magic carpet work on a route with a lot of F and C demand, and little/no competition, but such routes are hard to find in Jet Age with the general low demand.

The first two pictures below are with HD Y; the next two are magic carpet.

So far, the most profitable configuration I can find is around F4/C33/Y40, on routes where I can fill the whole C cabin (or slightly less C, and more Y, on less-premium routes).

[omaster]

Well in real life only BA was able to run the concorde profitably and only after they considerably raised prices up to what the public perceived it should of costed anyway. So it is not unrealistic that profits are hard to make.