How to Determine How Much Cargo Demand You Can Pull

[tungstennedge]

Hey everyone, I was bored and couldn't fall asleep, so I made a video explaining how to determine how much "Current demand" you can get out of the potential.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubCerdBpYI8

Not very many people seem to have a great understand of how City Based Demand works, and this video doesn't explain much, but it should help players looking to do cargo find the best kind of routes for making a lot of money in cargo (Uncontested cargo where current demand = 100% of potential demand)

Hopefully this help people start using the extremely under-utilized cargo demand!

Also if anyone is interested, I may want to make a detailed thorough demand to all aspects of City Based Demand I've learned so far if anyone is intereted.

[LemonButt]

I created an airline in HaF and within 5 years was in the top 10 based on everyone else just neglecting heavy cargo--I'd allocate up to 90% of capacity on flights to heavy.  I also based at airports that are "islands" with less/no competing overlapping airports--i.e. Denver, Minneapolis, Detroit--big cities with one big airport versus a London, New York, or similar with multiple airports (these airports are all top 20 cargo hubs now).  On top of this, cargo prices are less sensitive to pricing with heavy cargo being the least sensitive--you can actually double heavy cargo prices and still fly full (you can't do that with pax).  Short haul cargo is largely unprofitable, but if you 1.5-2.0x your prices you can print money on short haul also.  I have Tu204 flying 30000kg domestic flights in the US with 100% load factors and high prices that print money, largely due to this "island" effect of my base airports and lack of competition.  One of the reasons cargo is largely uncompetitive is because small/medium aircraft can't carry standard/heavy cargo which IMO needs to change.  Someone flying a Super Cargomaster should be able to frequency bomb a 300nm cargo route and displace my much larger Tu204, but since they can't I'm granted a de facto monopoly on these routes.

Another reason that cargo prints money is that cargo doesn't care about times--you can take off at 2am if you want without penalty.  This lets you buy cheap slots and fly into slot restricted airports.  One of the concepts I've discovered in my testing is that you should basically give up trying to consolidate demand into a single (destination) airport.  If you are flying to Houston for example, you shouldn't pick IAH or HOU to fly to exclusively--you should fly to both.  Since pax aircraft can carry standard belly cargo and skew the demand, it will nearly always be split across both airports versus having it all consolidated on a single route.  I think this part of CBD is actually broken because in many cities, such as Columbus, Ohio with 2 airports, one is supposed to be 90% cargo (Rickenbacker) and the other 90% pax (Port Columbus), but due to belly cargo frequency the bulk of all light/standard cargo ends up at Port Columbus making cargo flights to Rickenbacker largely futile.

The other reason I think cargo is largely neglected is because it is tedious AF.  If I were to look at a flight to Hong Kong it would be 1000% oversupplied, but the flight back would be only at 50%.  Flying an empty MD11F to Hong Kong to fly it home 90% full is counter intuitive when you have a pax mentality.  This means 2x the clicks to check return routes and the asymmetrical demand can drive you mad whereas most pax flights are largely symmetrical.  The Denver/Hong Kong route has a 400,000kg difference on the outbound and return flights.  The other reason that cargo is underplayed is the load factors--flying that Hong Kong route can be wildly profitable, but flying 0% and 100% load factor = 50% average load factor.  I read that 80% of flights IRL are volume limited and 70% are weight limited, so even IRL cargo carriers are flying with very low load factors depending on which metric you use.  So many pax players are used to competing for marketshare and to "win" instead of competing for profit, which is why cargo gets overlooked--50% load factors sounds terrible.

[Cardinal]

In one of the earliest cargo games I built a cargo hub at GSO (a real-life FedEx hub) and flew tech-stopped 737-200 freighters transatlantic. In many cases the demand was asymmetrical. I used that to my advantage to fly back to GSO nonstop from western Europe, or with only one tech stop from eastern/southern Europe where two stops were needed eastbound. Tedious, yeah. But it was later in the game after I had done a pax fleet transition from the Jurassics to the Classics and had converted all the -200 to freighters, so I needed something to do.

[Jetsetter]

I'M THE RICHEST CEO IN YOUR VIDEO.