Why The LF Is Going Down and should I expand?

[Play2Win]

Hi,

I am new and I am trying now some stuff and learning on the way.
I don't understand a certain thing.
On of my routes has a demand of 4K+ per day. I am the only one that covers that route.
At the beginning i had 100 % LF on all the flights to this destanations.. After I covered more than half of the demand, suddenly my LF has dropped on some of the flights. I suspected that it happened mostly on flights that on 4AM, but i can see that it also happened on flights that are at 12PM.
So, it looks kinda like a strange behavior for me. At first, everyone where fine with the 4AM and 12PM flights.. but now it just doesn't make sense.

Also, what are the best hours? How can i insure that my LF won't go down because of the flight hours? Or maybe there is another reason for that?

Another thing that I want to understand is that:
I started in a small airport with some nice destinations and almost no competition. Now, After I conquered most of the airport I would like to expand. The problem is that in most other cities there is a hard competition against some major players. Do I have a chance? Should I be going now for the big airports or again small once. Should I be afraid of the competition?
In most of the routes I can see that the demand and the supply are almost matched. Do I have a chance in those routes against major airline?

[Andre090904]

Hi there!

@LF: It's best to avoid everything between 23:55 and 04:55. Next to "bad" flight times you can also have less LF due to competition. Since this is not the case here, maybe you get the "aircraft too small penalty". You said your route has a demand of 4000. So if you use a small prop aircraft, you probably use a "too small aircraft". That's a warning which appears during opening a new route. This happens mostly on international flights or long flights, though. For example, you may technically fly a 737 from the US east coast to the UK. But for game mechanic reasons, that's a "too small aircraft", so people actually use wide bodies. Maybe you also increased prices which leads to less LF? Or your company image went down? There are many factors.

@Competition/opening new bases: If the demand is filled or not is only of minor importance. Obviously it's perfect to find unfulfilled demand, but that's not always easy to find. So let's take an example:

Hamburg - Cologne
Demand: 600
Competion: 1 airline with 3 daily flights with 200 seats each ("demand filled")

So there are 3 flights in total which offer 600 seats in total. Let's say you open a fourth flight on this route. You'd get 25% of the potential passengers, so 150 passengers for you. So if you take a Dash 8 Q400 with 68 seats or a EMB175 with 75 seats, you could easily fly 2 times daily this route without risking anything. Your 2 flights would be full while your competitor is stuck with now only 450 potential passengers instead of the original 600.

What I do is: I look for airports with a small number of airlines. Then I check if those airlines use rather big aircraft on short/medium haul routes (737, 757, A320 etc). Then I use ATR, Dash, Ejets, Fokker etc. ("medium aircraft") to challenge him on short haul/medium haul. It's much better to have full prop aircraft with a high frequency than 1 flight a day with a big bird. The small aircraft run profitably while the big bird is near empty.

So you can actually go to airports with competition. Just make sure that you have a good concept. I have a competitor which focusses on long-haul. No problem there going regional for me. Depends really on what's your plan. As you may know you should not have more than 3 fleet types at a time to avoid fleet commonality costs. So if an airline uses 737, 767 and 777, you can go regional without much trouble. You could use routes with demand between 30-200. But if you have a competitor with the fleet types ATR, Ejet, 737, you know he doesnt do longhaul. So your best guess is to go longhaul there.

[SP7]

I'm pretty new so take this for what it's worth... I think there's a modifier in to prevent you from scheduling all of your flights at the exact same time.

It looks like you have 5 CRJ9's flying the exact same route CGH-BSB 3x a day with the exact same departure schedule for each plane. I think this is your problem.

[Andre090904]

Yep, forgot to mention that. There should be at least 1h inbetween your own flights. You can fly without trouble at the same time as your competitors, though.

[Play2Win]

Wow, Really Lots of stuff that I didn't knew about the game. I will need to change some of my routes now haha

Thanks a lot guys !

[gazzz0x2z]

Yep, forgot to mention that. There should be at least 1h inbetween your own flights. You can fly without trouble at the same time as your competitors, though.

For very busy routes(2000 demand or more, though I'm not sure where exactly is the demand), you can afford 30 minutes difference between each flight.

[Andre090904]

As I was playing in Europa mostly, I have never actually seen such a high demand. But good to know, thanks!