How can you lose $100 million in 57.4 days of game time

[ukatlantic]

This has really annoyed me!  Until yesterday I was a very profitable airline making good money, then today all of a sudden I have lost the lot!!!  No matter what I did I was losing money left right and centre, and cannot for the life of me figure out why when all my aircraft (97 of them) were making extremely healthy  with an average of $300k weekly profit on all of them.  Is this some sort of bug in the game?

[Sami]

Hard to say when you don't seem to run the airline anymore, so I don't have the slightest clue what has been done there. Would have to be able to take a closer look to it before being able to comment anything really.

But 99.99% sure - not a bug ..

[jamboy2378]

Dang!

[swiftus27]

Did you raise your prices?  I did a well-needed 5% raise on all prices and it killed my airlines.

[Gaius Marius]

Thank god you just posted that.  I was going to raise my prices exactly 5% tonight!

[Murf]

"How to become a milionaire in an airline?? Simple Start out as a billionaire!!"  Probably one ofr the truist statements EVER made!!!

Welcome to the world of Airlines!!   

[bigdogshark62]

What we need is a DAILY accounting statement.  We have weekly, monthly, and annual, but I'd like to know why all my routes are profitable, but I lose 100k in a day.  It'd definitely be helpful. 

[elleana]

I'm merely speculating, but here are some reasons why:

New competitor on routes / New airline based at your hub
Many aircraft in C / D at the same time
Poor fleet commonality (this one is devious because its not reflected in aircraft profits)
Insufficient staff leading to low morale and cancelled flights, which in turns leads to lowered company image leading to decreased load factors

[Kontio]

What we need is a DAILY accounting statement.  We have weekly, monthly, and annual, but I'd like to know why all my routes are profitable, but I lose 100k in a day.  It'd definitely be helpful. 

That would not really be helpful because some expenses are paid once every week covering the whole week.

[chelseamad]

I can sympathise with you as I suffered a similar fate with my first airline.
In game 3 this appears to be a common problem with a number of large airline going bust recently.
You are going along nicely and then suddenly overnight you start losing money fast with no apparent reason as load factors do not seem to be down!

   Steve

[Sami]

No apparent reason = ?  Have you taken a look at the fuel prices recently    ..doubled in last 2 years.
https://www.airwaysim.com/game/Office/Fuel

[charger27]

Same thing with me... on a slightly smaller scale.

At my peak - I had 32 planes in the air, in all serviceable continents, every route in the green (lowest was 77%), 2 types of aircraft, 2 types of engines, YC config domestic and YCF for intercontinental, my oldest plane was 13.5 years, twin jets rather than quads (757 & 767), staff manually adjusted for max efficiency, and a conservative marketing campaign.

I loved to turn on my computer in the morning and see several million new dollars sitting there... then, basically overnight with no adjustments on my part - I started shrinking cash, then by day 3 of the spiral I was bleeding out, day 4 from 30-some million up to 14-plus million down and bankruptcy.
No, not C-checks, at most I only had 2 at once.
No, not D-checks, I always dumped my leased planes and bought others before the heavy maintenance hit.

I looked, and I looked at the statements... trying to figure out what was/went wrong.
In the end, and out of desperation, yes I tried some risky things... but that was 11th hour stuff to try and salvage my setup that had many hours invested in it.
Also in the 2nd day of my 4 day tragedy, my routes (both domestic and international) started backing off... in the end (4th day) about a third of them were in the 60's% (kicking a guy on his way down).

To this day I do not know what happened, and I have not been able to come close to regaining a respectable presence since then.
As well, it seems that if you aren't well established by the 40 - 50% timeframe, you are hooped.
My rise and fall occurred from 0 - 34% of the timeline.
Obviously I was doing something wrong... just don't know what it was - which is frustrating in that it will probably transpire again because the issues weren't identified.

If anyone has the magic answers, I'm willing to listen and learn.
My goal for future games is not to get huge, but to survive from 0 to 100.
When I see the size of some of the airlines going down these days... it seems if you don't have a few billion slush fund built up, your company could be next.

As I have mentioned - as an aviation enthusiast I just want to fly some different types of planes around to the various world locations, that's my thrill... I'm not one of these killer competitive guys that is even attempting to be top doggy, and basically signs up here to have a second job managing a virtual airline.
I still say the parameters need to be dialed back a little to make this fun again and a little more user friendly.
Perhaps two different games worlds - one "relaxed" and one "realistic".
Betcha the relaxed fills first! 

[ukatlantic]

I checked the fuel price aircraft were still making profit!  Out of interest and I hope Sami can answer this, if the fuel price doubles when you reset the route prices to their default does that default price factor in that the fuel price has risen or is it based on the original route price when that route was opened in say 1989?  I also agree with the above post, in that as an airline manager you need to be able to easily identify what is going wrong with your company, I invested alot of time in my airline to see it go down the pan in 24 hours.

Maybe an 'assistant' would be a good new feature to add that will give you a little hint at what needs looking at without giving you the full answer as to whats going wrong, at the moment, it is really difficult to identify the exact issue thats causing you to lose money hand over fist.  In the real world airline industry you would have an accounts dept who would look at everything closely and a CFO and would soon be running to the CEO if it was identified that a major issue was going on to cause you to go bankrupt if you didnt deal with the issue.

[lauderj]

I've seen one thing that can totally wreck your airline if you don't prepare for it  .... the yearly C checks. If you buy or lease a bunch of new a/c that get delivered in close proximity to each other that means their C checks will all hit at roughly the same time. And its a double edge sword. You incurre the expense of the C check and at the same time you lose the variable margin of the routes since they are obviously not flow while the a/c is in C check. Since variable margins can be as high as 70 to 75% of the revenue, it's a big peice of change .... maybe more than the cost of the C check. So it's a double wammy. If you leave your C/D checks on auto you have no control and bamb, a bunch of planes can suddenly go out of service all at once before you know it.

I like to keep C/D check on manual control and try to stagger them out which may mean starting a C check a month or two before it's due for a/c that have their due dates bunched together. If you have a large fleet, it's probably worth the expense to invest in several spare a/c that can take over routes when a plane goes into a C/D check.

Jerry L
CEO Transjet Airways

[bigdogshark62]

That would not really be helpful because some expenses are paid once every week covering the whole week.

True, but I have to disagree that it wouldn't be helpful.  On the contrary, it would be VERY helpful to see where a company is leaking money. 

Case in point: I just lost $300k from Monday to Tuesday.  All my routes and aircraft on that day are profitable.  It's not staff salaries, as those are paid on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.  Sooooooo, where did that money go?  I don't know, because all we have is the "weekly" breakdown.  If I had a "daily" breakdown, I can see where the $300k went. 

Just my opinion on what would be helpful for me.