How do you schedule lots of aircraft quickly

[GeraldIsCool]

I have just purchased 10 new aircraft and scheduling them takes ages, how do some airlines with 500 aircraft do it so quickly, is there a secret tool, or is it just something that takes a while and each one has to be done manually?

[tungstennedge]

Once you schedule a ton you just get fast. There are tons of tiny little tricks that add up do very fast scheduling. In general, 7 long haul planes takes around 5-7mins for me, and 7 short haul planes takes around 15-20m

[Cardinal]

Airlines with 500 aircraft didn't schedule them all at once. It takes several game years to acquire that many planes. You schedule them as you receive them.

[knobbygb]

As already said, it takes time to gain the experience to do it efficiently.

The main thing is to plan ahead.  At the start of the game or when I open a new base, I try to put two or three hours aside to make a spreadsheet of ALL possible routes and how long they take on the aircraft type(s) I might use.  For this you really need a good desktop PC or laptop where you can have 20 or 30 tabs open at once.  I have NEVER been able to schedule on my phone!

Once you have that, you can quite quickly pull together routes that would work together by sorting and searching the spreadsheet.  I even wrote a couple of little Excel Macros that highlight groups of two or three routes that fill up exactly 24 hours and one that helps to choose a 7-day schedules quickly.  You don't even have to worry too much about keeping the spreadsheet up-to-date though the game as demand, mostly, changes linearly. IT gets a bit messy to keep track of sometimes but works well in that important first year or so.

I create and update the spreadsheet manually as it's not allowed to run automatic scripts against the game itself (and I don't think I know how to anyway). Before anyone asks, no, you can't have a copy of my Macro.  Hehe.