Aircraft maintenance efficeincy and number of bases

[Usagi]

Currently I'm trying to phase out my old Saab 90's with Fokker F.27's, but I'm starting to wonder if I should procure another aircraft type for that role for the other half of my bases instead of operating a single fleet out of 6 different bases.

At what point is it more efficient to operate a second fleet type (assuming they are using the same engines) over running a single fleet for a single role across all bases?

While I haven't noticed much difference in cost from going from 3 bases to 4 bases, seeing the fleet efficiency drop is a bit worrisome, and it's hard to tell if I would be better off with another aircraft type or not.

It's only my first game playthrough, so any input the veteran players might have would be helpful, Thanks.

[knobbygb]

It sounds like you're quite a small airline with only a small number of each time so I don't know 100%, for sure, but I'd say it's ALWAYS going to be more efficient to operate a single type split across bases than to have different types.  Having said that, fleet-type penalties have almost disappeared now but the penalty for splitting across bases is still new, so I'm just going of "previous" logic.

Looking at my airlines (fleet commonality page) efficiency drops to 91.7% and 83.3% for two and three bases as far as 53.3% when a fleet is spread across 9 bases. That doesn't really mean much though without knowing exactly how that figure is used.

Is your airline in a stable enough position that you can run some experiments to find out?

[Usagi]

I did some tests today when I had a few spare aircraft available and running the F.27's from 2 additional bases dropped the efficiency from %75 to %58.3 but only increased costs by around 2k. So really negligible for a fleet this size (48 aircraft). Most of the increase was in 'fixed maintenance' costs, but it isn't really clear how the efficiency figure is applied in the equation.

I'll just stick with one type of aircraft for this role and run them at lower efficiency. Maybe for larger more expensive aircraft and/or smaller fleet sizes it might make more of a difference but from what I can tell the benefits of running a larger fleet of one aircraft far outweighs the additional costs from low efficiency.