Covering for Maintenance

[CraigAbz]

Folks

I've spent (too long!) building up an airline in a beginner world and got to nearly 200 aircraft now over 5 bases.  I like researching the routes and getting the planes organised etc. 

It seems "poor service" to leave a route unserved when an aircraft goes into maintenance.  Therefore I'm spending most of the game time juggling schedules to cover for planes in C-check (I aim to put them back to lessor before a D-check) which is pretty boring.  Do others think it worthwhile to cover these periods or do you just take the hit when a plane is out of action for a couple of weeks? 

Also, with my spare/cover planes, I often rebase them in order to go where cover is needed.  I note the warning when doing it of increased marketing costs but don't know how much of a hit this is.  Anyone know? I don't really mind if there's a small cost associated with it, but maybe the cover is not worth the rebasing cost.  And certainly, if it will have longer term higher costs then I don't want to continue that practise. 

Re-jigging schedules for maintenance isn't much fun and a fair amount of work with 200 aircraft so I don't know how others manage it with many more!  Any thoughts welcome. 

Regards
Craig









 

[gazzz0x2z]

It's interesting when you're small. When you begin to grow, it becomes useless. C check inactivity is just a cost to forecast for. D checks are better to avoid when the aircraft is leased, but when you own 1200 planes, you don't even notice them anymore.
,
Your gaming time is limited, you'll get more results in investing your game time in other areas : improving your schedules, optimizing your prices, finding new routes, finding weak competitors about to collapse, etc...

[Sami]

Yea I wouldn't bother with the C check tinkering.

[LemonButt]

A best practice is if you are flying multiple flights to a destination, don't put them on the same aircraft.  You get no "penalty" for having an aircraft in C-check, but if you're flying 2x daily and all those flights are on a single aircraft getting 75% LF, you aren't serving that destination at all when it goes in to C-check.  If you have 2x daily on 2 different aircraft and the first one goes down for C-check, the second one will start getting ~100% LF and you'll be capturing at least some of the demand left on the table by maintenance.  On the flip side, if you are flying that route with competition then you are giving your competitors the extra demand (and vice versa when they go down for maintenance) so it's better to have a "distributed schedule" in order to at least partially address this and capture as much demand as possible.

[CraigAbz]

OK good points, thanks.  Makes sense.  And a whole lot easier not juggling these!