Overnight routing of small planes

[smiller]

When routing a small plane like a Heron 2 with only 17 passengers is it better to run routes overnight and take the big $ hit or is it better to leave all of that white space at night and just run them between 0600 and 2300?

Thanks.

[Amelie090904]

Not sure about range and available routes, but you could have flights that depart at 2355 and land at 0500 without major issues. If your base/HQ airport has no available options, you could have the return flight TO your base/HQ be over night. Of course that only works if the Heron has good enough range.

But yes, leaving white spaces is fine normally - especially with smaller planes that have many flights per day.

[smiller]

Not sure about range and available routes, but you could have flights that depart at 2355 and land at 0500 without major issues. If your base/HQ airport has no available options, you could have the return flight TO your base/HQ be over night. Of course that only works if the Heron has good enough range.

I wasn't sure if the fact that a plane that for instance takes off at 11pm and lands back at your home airport at 6am counted as a penalty because it lands at the destination airport in between, or if it was only penalized if you land at your home airport between those hours. If  that makes sense.  

If that is OK to do, then I assume you could have the plane layover for extra time before the return trip to make sure it doesn't arrive back home until after 5 or 6?

Thanks for your reply.

[LemonButt]

You should be flying red-eye flights--if you are flying west, make sure the return flight leaves late between 2200-2300 so it lands at ~500 with the time change.  If you are flying east then take off between 2200-2300 so the return flight departs ~600 (and potentially lands at ~600 based on time change).

If you are using 7-day scheduling for everything, this is a relatively easy exercise.  If you aren't, then you will end up with gaps in your scheduling and stagger your A-checks to happen on different days of the week (i.e. plane 1 has A-check at 0:00 on Monday, plane 2 at 0:00 on Tuesday, etc) and then when you have your 7th aircraft you fly those missing redeye routes (1 per day--you'll have 6 different red-eye routes on 6 different days) so you are flying each red-eye 7x/week.  If you have them all taking off between 2200-2300 with roughly the same flight time, you can pull this off with minimal "whitespace" in your schedule.

I'm not in the same gameworld as you, but it appears you're in the US so if you're in Central or Mountain time zones you'll find this a bit more challenging and might just need to add an extra hour to the turnaround time to maximize your fleet utilization.

[sanabas]

I wasn't sure if the fact that a plane that for instance takes off at 11pm and lands back at your home airport at 6am counted as a penalty because it lands at the destination airport in between, or if it was only penalized if you land at your home airport between those hours. If  that makes sense.  

Each leg of the flight is independent. If the outbound leg is 2255-0240, it gets penalised for landing in the middle of the night. If the return leg is 0305-0620, it gets penalised for taking off in the middle of the night. If one of the legs is 0115-0345, it gets penalised for both.

The only thing where timing doesn't matter for pax is techstops, a 2am local time techstop is no different to a 2pm local time techstop.

For very small planes like Herons, it is almost certainly not worth flying them overnight. They don't have the range for a redeye, and any route big enough that you can still get 12-15 pax in the middle of the night will be better flown by a 40+ seat plane. Just take off for first route at 0500-0510, land final route of day at 2345-2355, leaving exactly 5 hours for A-check, and let the plane sit idle overnight. Can run an overnight flight in that gap just to build up RI if you want to, or if you really go overboard and do 7 day scheduling on a small plane flying 5-6 destinations per day, you may want an occasional middle of night flight to make things fit. Running costs are low, so it's not like it's a huge expense, but it won't really add to profits.

Same goes for most medium planes, you'll run out of viable overnight flights long before you run out of all routes, so you'll end up doing the same, using plane for 19 hours with 5 hours downtime overnight.

[groundbum2]

there are some rare circumstances where you can block all the seats and fly your pax plane overnight as a pseudo cargo plane.. of course no CH but still get some CL and CS..

Simon

[Cardinal]

For very small planes like Herons, it is almost certainly not worth flying them overnight.

Beg to differ...

I've flown Herons on redeyes, profitably, even with tech stops. In the era where Herons are built, tech stops are still quite viable and usually profitable. In one game, I was getting more than 22 hours a day utilization out of several of my Herons. And they printed money doing this.

[sanabas]

Any route you can fly a techstopped heron on will be better served by flying a direct 40 seater.

[Cardinal]

Any route you can fly a techstopped heron on will be better served by flying a direct 40 seater.

This is true.

But sometimes circumstances (including competition, aircraft availability, and any special rules in a particular game world) dictate that you are flying Herons on routes they aren't the 100% best plane for. Dismissing routes that would be better on a different fleet type you don't have, but that the fleet type you do have can serve profitably if you get creative, leaves money on the table... and leaves a path open to bottom-feeding competitors like me