Responses to major events

[Sami]

What sort of capability we should build for airlines to mitigate large-scale world events?

These would be:
- temporarily suspending flights
- staff layoffs
- something else?

First is rather tricky and would involve a lot of manual work, so not sure if that's feasible.
For the second the easiest option is to simply give a new option to do layoffs instead of firing the staff, with minimal negative company image effects.

Overall it's a bit tricky to model a good response to a worldwide demand decline for example. Since you wish to keep the routes in schedule. But on the other hand you'd like to cut the loss-making routes and staff.

Perhaps just add a layoff component to staff systems as a way to get rid of extra staff for up to 90days(?) without paying them.

[groundbum2]

postpone big bills for 90 days, for example

fuel
taxes
landing and nav charges

have staff wage cuts of 50%, with morale affected but no effect on CI

Simon

[Tha_Ape]

Freeze schedules? And one would choose which planes are concerned.

- Keep the planes
- all flights cancelled
- phantom crews for the maintenance or "just in case"
- no loss of slots
- slow decrease in RI (but not below a certain threshold)
- more costly than not having the planes scheduled in the 1st place
- less costly than flying the planes empty

[LemonButt]

A simple mechanism would be to keep everything running as normal but providing bailout options for airlines--they get to choose the size and conditions of the bailout, which will ultimately saddle them with lots of debt with some strings attached.

The issue is that for epic gameworlds the big airlines end up with tens of billions in cash and/or assets and are going to be completely unaffected.  I've run big airlines and small airlines successfully, but in terms of game mechanics the big airlines have such an overwhelming advantage that almost all world events that happen today are a slight inconvenience at best.  I have a big airlines in the US in HaF and I only lost money for about 6 weeks after 9/11 and turned a profit for the quarter and that is the biggest event that will ever happen to my airline.  There is a good opinion piece in the Washington Post this morning from a bankruptcy professor at Fordham that outlines the current situation from a rational business and legal perspective: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/22/us-airlines-dont-need-bailout-stay-business/

I think in terms of a bailout offer that is offered to larger airlines, there could be provisions on company image (max 50, for example) and giving up slots at slot constrained airports.  So for example, if you have 21 slots at LHR, terms of a bailout would include that you must give up 14 slots and are prohibited from having more than 7 slots at LHR for 10 years or until the loan is repaid.  Part of the government's role in regulation is ensuring competition so that consumers are benefiting from more choice/lower prices.  This would mean airlines would have to reschedule only some of their aircraft, but nonetheless they would have to make decisions on where to cut/reallocate resources in a way that makes sense.

So basically the actions taken by players aren't what they are doing to reduce flights, lay off staff, etc. but what penalties they are willing to accept against their operation when things get back to normal (slot restrictions, CI caps, etc) which would be the strings attached to a bailout.

I think a more practical set of events would be the issues we've seen with the 787 batteries and the 737 MAX where a certain fleet type is affected.  This would disproportionally effect large airlines while leaving the little guys alone.  So if you grounded all 777 for a period of 3 months, for example, that is significant.  We also pay a bunch of money for insurance that never gets used, so implementing plane crashes would seem prudent--crash a 777 where the player has a hull loss and have governments ground all 777 for 3 months until a fix is put in place.  The crashed airline takes a CI hit of course.  The response to this would be airlines who own the aircraft can store it in the desert and airlines who lease will get lease forgiveness where they can return their aircraft to the leasing company immediately with no penalty.  There would need to be some "bulk action" capability for this, but the net effect would be a big drop in aircraft and a loss of slots (for not flying route for 3 months unless they immediately replace).  This will free up slots at slot constrained airports and for airlines who lease instead of own, drop their fleet size substantially.  You would have to allow players to lay off employees without a CI/morale penalty also.

Right now events are "reactive" where something happens and an airline is completely unchanged unless a player takes action.  Right now we're seeing countries close borders and airlines aren't allowed to make any decisions as they are forced upon them (cancelling flights)--this I think is where events need to go.  Players don't play in real time of course, so it would have to be something like a 777 crashed and governments are currently planning to ground all 777 in 6 weeks for an indefinite period--all leased 777 will be returned to lessor by default unless you opt in to pay the leases and all owned aircraft will be grounded with unused slots being lost in 4 weeks.  Or China is closing it's borders in 6 weeks due to a pandemic and all flights will be cancelled indefinitely due to a pandemic, do you want to accept a bailout from the government with X conditions to prevent bankruptcy?

[LemonButt]

Actually since accounting accurately shows assets + liabilities, it would be cool if we could sell tickets in the future--something that all airlines obviously already do.  This might require some more robust revenue management tools, but ultimately it would be nice to be able to get cash in today to fund expansion with a liability on the books.  Airlines right now aren't giving refunds, but vouchers to use on future flights.  So if this were implemented, all those cancelled flights/reduced demand/etc. would generate a bunch of future liabilities that airlines must deliver on.

RI would determine what % of tickets are sold in the future (along with prices), so if an airline wants to offer super low prices to get as much cash in as soon as possible to fund expansion, it will be at their future detriment. This would add another layer of strategy to the game and also give you more levers to pull in terms of causing pain during world events.

[Todorojoz]

For temporarily suspending flights, maybe have an option to suspend all flights below "x" load factor threshold where the airline would choose what % they would keep flying at. The only issue there is on routes with multiple flights where you'd have a better LF by closing some of them. So maybe another option to limit all routes to 1 flight daily and the rest would be suspended, keeping the flight with the best LF.  When you were done, you just unselect the options and your airline returns to normal. Only ongoing issue is if you happen to lose slots or not.

This would mean that all planes and routes were still setup and wouldn't have to be redone, but the routes would just be temporarily inactive until you reactivated it.

[MuzhikRB]

Also Sami important note

Please consider limiting ALL events only to airports where at least one HQ.

I have been noticing plenty events in airports where no player is based. It useless anyway.


I support idea about grounding some families due safety issues. No crashes is needed for that. Just safety investigation is enough.

Medium scale is grounding one family.
Large scale grounding any aircraft that have engine XXX for example.
It can influence current family or it can delay of delivery of new aicrafts. Or both.

[JumboShrimp]

These would be:
- temporarily suspending flights
- staff layoffs
- something else?

- rage quit?

[Talentz]

For rage quit: Should do large-scale world events on the last year of an epic game; No end-game achievements!


Talentz

[Wreck]

Any of those options would just penalise anyone who was not lucky enough to be on-line when the event is announced, and especially if someone is offline for a couple of days due to RL events.

[LemonButt]

We are experiencing the pandemic event in Speedy Recovery.  Would it not make sense to have airports reducing their navigation fees etc as party of the event?

[LemonButt]

Oil in the US has crashed to the point where the price is negative due to running out of storage--are airlines going to get paid out based on fuel burn ;P

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/20/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html