Need some fresh air

[LemonButt]

In the current AG, when it was in I think late 80s and 90s, the f27 freighters I had from both Charlotte and IAD were profitable. Nothing insane, I only had ~40 of them, and there weren't the same opportunities to scale it up like there were for pax turboprops, but the freighters were producing similar profits to the mid-tier pax planes, and would have been a sustainable airline on their own.

That is probably possible to some extent right now in the year 2020 in AG thanks to fuel only being at 367 if you can believe it.  If I'm not mistaken the airports have their traffic/infra levels capped to the 6-7 range in that time period which means the cargo fees are also all lower as a result.  When those airports go to 8-9-10 the cargo fees as a percentage go way up (my understanding at least) and in a normal gameworld, fuel is 1000+.  The other challenge with the light/standard cargo is you are competing with belly cargo, which is fine in the early years when pax demand is lower, but in the 90's onward the belly cargo capacity of large aircraft along with more pax frequency sucks out all the oxygen by default.  Not sure what you can do about that necessarily unless belly cargo is limited to light cargo only for large aircraft and light/standard for very large unless we start talking about adding more cargo classes...

[Todorojoz]

I had similar success with Q400CC aircraft in AG out of Seoul in 2017. They were combi planes, but performed at a similar level to the regular Q400NG. Maybe just a little worse.

[knobbygb]

I also had a fleet of over 100 Il-114F that were (mostly) profitable, but that was in a 'challenge' world so might not reflect reality due to the smaller number of players.

Having said that, I totally with what LemonButt said. In particular, these smaller aircraft need to carry Heavy cargo to compete on the saturated routes between big cities where the pax. aircraft take all the Light/Medium cargo.  The Heavy on those routes is going pretty much unserved anyway, unless anybody is operating a combi.I agree that the range/speed/volume of these already very much limit how much they can carry anyway and that limitation is certainly enough to stop any 'spamming' of larger routes.

In the new Speed World I'm going for a Medium/Small only airline, just for fun, so I will be trying Medium freighters again...  Probably not the Ilyushin this time.

[Alpha]

I think medium freighters can be profitable but in a very niche scenario  - where the passenger demand is unable to support a large plane and there is ample (>50% of its MPL) standard and light cargo demand as well as having a medium freighter option for the main passenger fleet of your choice, and even if the demand pattern and your fleet selection matches, medium freighters dont earn much in any event (I would assume light freighter is only even worse).

I take two of my freighters as an example:

I do own Viscount 800Fs in AG (mid 90s by now) and is earning me 50-60k per week where LF is 50%. Discounting 40k and 30k per month for commonality and crew costs, I am looking at a monthly profit of about 170k. A C-check costs around 700k, so my annual profit is approximately 1.34M I think?

Compared to a heavy freighter at similar LF, a DC-9F earns me 350k per week at similar LF, minus 40k commonality cost and 40k crew cost, and the monthly profit is about 1M. A C-check costs 1.3M, so I am looking at an annual profit of 10.7M, which is about 8 times the profit of a medium freighter.

The proposition for medium combis are much helped by the lower freight demand requirement and subsidized by the passengers.

Adopting lemonbutt's suggestion surely helps but will need to figure out a way to cure potential frequency wars, which I guess will be another topic for us.

[JumboShrimp]

If it is difficult to compete with medium freighters flying against large pax aircraft with belly cargo, that part would actually reflect RW situation.

[Sami]

that part would actually reflect RW situation.

Talking of the real world: The majority of "light" air cargo is carried as a belly cargo with passenger flights since the volume of cargo to many destinations is simply so small. However the biggest cargo revenue comes by a big margin from dedicated freighters.

Dedicated air cargo operation is mainly a long-haul business in the real life, and most of the short-haul cargo is either feeder traffic or lighter cargo such as mail or other expedited parcels. Generally trucks and trains are used for 99% of cargo transportation on short distances, and for longer distances majority of goods is transported by containerships.

=> In summary - building a cargo-only airline flying < 1000 nm routes is difficult, for a reason.

[tungstennedge]

I had a long post typed up the other day for this but decided not to post it as to stir the pot, but the short answer is he is 100% accurate that light and standard cargo that the only way to win is to not play the game.  That is, if you are flying small or medium freighters it is impossible to be profitable.  You must carry heavy cargo with large+ aircraft to actually be profitable.

I've beat so many horses so many times, but this IMO is just a symptom of a larger problem that "power users" like myself and others will tinker to see what's possible and try new things, only to find things are broken or not working as intended.  This feedback gets shared and everyone claims its a waste of time or otherwise because it doesn't affect the vanilla all Airbus/Boeing airline at a top 50 airport strategy that 90%+ of players seem to use.  The bottom line is that you can make money flying light and standard cargo, but only if you are flying long distances which can only be done with large or very large aircraft.  If you are trying to fly small or medium aircraft which cap out at 1000nm range on a good day, it is impossible to make money--even out of secondary or third-ary or fourth-ary airport.  I had a huge fleet of Il-114 in HaF out of Gary once upon a time and even with the massive demand Chicago provides, flew with a -20% profit margin I want to say.  In Speedy Recovery I had CRJ200F that I was flying with 100% standard cargo capacity to it's limit within Europe (Cologne to Turkey, for example) that I believe were maybe breaking even, but that was with high load factors and hacky cargo allocation.

Re: cargo on small and medium airplanes I've made the case before that heavy cargo has nothing to do with volume and a can of tomato soup is considered heavy cargo based on the density calculations and a Cessna can't fly cans of tomato soup, nor can a medium freighter such as the CRJ200F.  This is in spite of the fact the cargo door is larger than a 737F which can carry heavy cargo (I think it was 737F).  This hard coded limitation makes it impossible for these smaller aircraft to ever use their real world payload limitations.  The Cessna Supercargomaster has a max payload of 1618kg but is limited to only 80% of it's payload of 1280kg because it can only carry volumetric light cargo, for example.

The net effect if you are running a cargo airline you need to fly very large aircraft or basically 757F.  This isn't theory at this point--you can look at virtually any game world and see this is true.  There is 1 small aircraft (Cessna) and 3 medium aircraft freighters in AG and out of those I am the only one who owns any Cessnas and there are no medium freighters in service.  The Il-114 for a long period was the only medium freighter available and only 6 were ever built.  There are approx 100 Tu204 freighters in service and 7750 757F in service.  Cargo has basically been distilled down to flying B757F and very large aircraft (MD11F, 777F, 747F).

I have plenty of opinions on how to improve cargo and other features as I've said before I feel like I've beat a lot of dead horses that no one really cares about because no one has really paid attention to it, but in terms of the statement that medium freighters (and small ones) being unprofitable/impossible is largely accurate based on all of the above.  A Cessna has the payload capacity and a purpose built cargo door to transport a palette of tomato soup, but the hard coded limitations in the game make this impossible.  If these aircraft could fly, they could fly.  Again, standard cargo is profitable if you fly it far enough, but that can only be done on large/very large aircraft.  I've tested and confirmed this first hand and I'd like to think most of the "power users" would consider me an above average player that should be able to figure it out if it's actually possible...

With all of this being said, I mentioned I didn't post before because I don't want to stir the pot--there is an overwhelmingly large amount of things that are "right" with the game and I don't want to overshadow this.  But I am happy others are now experiencing and speaking up about the same issues I've encountered to help move everything forward.  IMO the solution is to make every dedicated freighter capable of handling any class of cargo.  Smaller aircraft are already range limited and considering CBD produces more cargo as the distance goes up (to an extent), there really is no need to doubly penalizing these aircraft by limiting them to the least profitable cargo available on the shortest routes with the lowest volumes, which in so many words is what I believe Wreck (the OP on the cargo) was trying to articulate.

I think a large factor in play here, is the fact that IRL, as Sami mentioned, most cargo is moved by trains/trucks, or container ships. However, time sensitive cargo still forms the IRL cargo airlines, and modelling these in airwaysim is simply impossible. Smaller cargo aircraft, like cessna cargomaster IRL are used as feeders to large aircraft, or to fly small amounts of cargo off to their final destinations. For example, fedex uses these small aircraft to deliver from secondary hubs to final destinations. Most overnight shipping done by fedex to these smaller cities can make two stops + to reach its destination. Small cargo planes are meant to work in tendem with large ones, in hub-spoke models but since AWS is only point to point, medium and small cargo planes are just kinda useless, and anyone flying them is probably just looking for a challenge.

What I would really like to see tho is changes to break the 757f's monopoly on being the only competitive freighter for the majority of most gameworlds, due to the arbitrary classification of being large and not VL aircraft. Even though many airpots have long enough runways, just slightly bigger aircraft like a300/767 cant fly to lvl 2 airports forcing players to use 757. I would love to see lvl 2 airports accept any VL cargo only aircraft, that would be a quick fix bandaid fix to 757'd reign of domination, since 767f and a300 would be viable alternatives.

[LemonButt]

Talking of the real world: The majority of "light" air cargo is carried as a belly cargo with passenger flights since the volume of cargo to many destinations is simply so small. However the biggest cargo revenue comes by a big margin from dedicated freighters.

Dedicated air cargo operation is mainly a long-haul business in the real life, and most of the short-haul cargo is either feeder traffic or lighter cargo such as mail or other expedited parcels. Generally trucks and trains are used for 99% of cargo transportation on short distances, and for longer distances majority of goods is transported by containerships.

=> In summary - building a cargo-only airline flying < 1000 nm routes is difficult, for a reason.

This is accurate of course, but in the real world there isn't a demand vacuum like there is in AWS.  For example, in AG from Gary - Chicago to The Eastern Iowa there is 5260kg of cargo demand with 1420kg of that being heavy cargo (call it white glove, final mile, whatever you want--that demand exists).  That heavy cargo will NEVER get served unless you go balls out with a large B757 with 7x+ the supply required to actually serve the route.  Likewise, many smaller airports can't even accommodate the larger aircraft.  So the game ends up being designed where if you carry more cargo, the airport will expand to accommodate large aircraft, but you can only carry more cargo if you have large aircraft leading to a Mexican standoff that never resolves itself.  So if small/medium freighters are heavy cargo capable like they are in the real world, you aren't creating the demand vacuum we have in AWS by requiring a binary approach of supplying either 0 supply or 40 tons of supply, neither of which are profitable or appropriate for a route with 5 tons of demand.  Granted not every route will always be profitable (the 10 pax 1000nm routes), but small/medium cargo is an extreme case where it's not just some routes are unprofitable, but ALL routes are unprofitable.  Additionally, if these aircraft are completely uneconomical and hard coded to fail, shouldn't they just be removed from the game completely?

[stealy]

Cargo has basically been distilled down to flying B757F and very large aircraft (MD11F, 777F, 747F).

I actually don't fly any of the freighters you mentioned and I have over 800 freighters in my fleet.

A321-200F is surprisingly profitable for a Large AC. And don't forget 767-300F... I personally prefer it over 777F for its flexibility.

[Talentz]

I want to learn how to cargo ~


but true enough, I am tired of using the same variants of aircraft families to win cargo, over and over again. Kudos to Meddix. Only thing that hasn't been done yet is win pax and cargo in a GW. I guess NY and LAX really are king for a reason 


Talentz

[gazzz0x2z]

TU-204CE has been especially good to me in the Asian Challenge. It's suddenly very obsolete when the 321F appears, but until then, it's a very efficient money maker. Can't cover the whole globe if you're not in Europe, but still excellent, and profitable around 15 tons one way. With modern fuel prices. Double tech stop mandatory.

[Zorak]

Fellow AWS players!

I played this game for more than three years. I spend countless days, and nights, trying to work out how to schedule my planes. I invested a lot of time into it all, and I dont regret it. But the challenge of that seems gone. I could of course make a bigger airline. I could try to go for a "Japanese Plane Lover Award", I could spend less wisely and go for the Russian one too though.

But truth be said: I dont want to. Already 1 1/2 years ago, after the end of my first "long" gameworld, I was not sure, if I would continue with the game. But I liked the project, so I gave it another go and played another gameworld and even started a second low-intensity game in parallel, just to support the cause. And while I tried to invest myself in this game, as many others did, it seems I have lost a lot of the "drive" and affection for this project.

And maybe I get it wrong, but I have the feeling that I am not the only one who is getting bored with AWS. It seems to me, that player numbers are dwindling. But possibly I just feel that way because in my airline-alliances forum, there was no new message for more than two weeks? Cooperation and communication between airlines has been reduced to an all-time low. And with it, it seems the game has lost more than just one layer of depth; really a whole dimension is gone.

Quite a lot of feature requests and proposals made are really worth implementing in my opinion, but lately it seems nothing is being done. And if, it is for the worse. Half-hearted quick-fixes are made permanent. Lots of "construction sites" expose big weaknesses in game mechanics for years. Maybe it is the current state of the world, and it all seems frozen, but AWS is paralyzed since long before.

How do you feel about it?

best regards,
DanDan

Greetings DanDan

Every game world is different and as you said you can go for achievenments OR set a goal yourself, or maybe play some shorter speed worlds?

Kind regards,
Justin

[emrah.dincer]

I've been waiting for I think over 5 years to restart playing the game. I check the forums a few times per year (hence my account getting deleted every time) to see if connecting pax (or A-B-C-B-A when your base is B, 6th freedom) is implemented yet, and it's never on the horizon. I know this is a side project thus this is not a complaint, but just the reason of one potential player not playing.

[Maxair]

I said from expensive base.  LemonButt's experiments were from a very cheap base.

BTW, I have a flight from EWR to ATL that is 100% full, 90% of it is heavy cargo and it is losing money.  So flying short distance between super expensive bases is a challenge even for a large aircraft.

That example right there is a problem. That just shouldnt be. Unless youre flying for free lol