Scheduling before plane delivery

[splotch]

I know the answer to this question is out there because I remember knowing it when I played the game years ago, but I can't seem to find it. How long before plane delivery is it safe to do the scheduling? I'm doing 7 day scheduling and my first plane has just arrived. If I schedule all of the flights for seven-day but don't fly some of them for 2-3 months, will the system surrender my slots?

[splotch]

OOPS -- here it is on the airport slots page:

Slots cannot be sold but you will lose the slot if you do not fly the associated route for two months.

How do people usually do this? Do you wait until you're within 2 months of the delivery of the seventh plane and then schedule them all up at once, or do you do it one plane at a time? I'm thinking I'll just wait for convenience.

[Zombie Slayer]

I create the 7 day schedule without slots (by clicking the "do not buy slots for this route" box) then as planes are delivered and I assign routes to those planes, I buy the slots.

[splotch]

Makes sense. Thanks. Is there a more efficient way to then buy the slots besides going through the scheduling screen and editing each route separately?

[[ATA] Hassel]

There is also the classic way where you open a tap for each single route and use the "create another route like this for the next day" button. Keep the taps min. in a separate window and open them when you receive a new plane to create new route to this plane. 

For complex 7 day scheduling remember you can use ctr+TAP to quickly switch to the next tap

[Luperco]

I've notice in the past that if you never flight the route, I'll loose the slot before two month.

[knobbygb]

How do people usually do this? Do you wait until you're within 2 months of the delivery of the seventh plane and then schedule them all up at once, or do you do it one plane at a time? I'm thinking I'll just wait for convenience.

A little more complicated... but I "build" the 7 day schedule on paper and then create the routes one destination at a time, for the  whole week, at the proper times, as each aircraft arrives and assign one to each aircraft.  Then when the 7th aircraft arrives, I simply need to cancel and re-create all the routes as individual daily ones and they all slot together nicely without any re-timing or changing of slots.  Of course, this only works when all the routes are less than 24hrs each and so can be assigned to individual aircraft.

This saves having 5 or 6 expensive planes sat around in storage or running lots of new routes only once or twice a week (which costs a lot in extra staff and makes the RI build REALLY slowly). Another advantage is that it hides your future intentions from competitors.  If you create a once-daily to each of, say 14 new destinations as soon as the first aircraft arrives, they then have maybe 4 to 6 months to respond to all your new routes.