Trying to sim/ have some fun with a small Caravan airline operation.
Why in gods name, for a 10 plane operation does the game think i need FORTY people in route strategies for example.
An airline of this size would have at MOST 5-6 Management staff in totality. Yet this game thinks I need FOUR HUNDRED staff, 19 of which are pilots.
Come on AWS, there's gotta be a better way to do this? If I fire most of them will this break the rest's morale and my airline, or is this adaptable.
I agree with this. The overhead for an airline flying small aircraft is ridiculous. I can make $350k on a 50-seater turbo prop, yet still not make a profit because of staffing levels. (Marketing is also disproportionate for smaller airlines, but I realize that's hard to change.)
Over time though, as your airline expands, it should level out a bit.
ref pilots. The game assumes you keep these planes flying 24x7 so 19 pilots for 10 planes is if anything on the low side. Pilots are restricted to 900 flying hours a year, plus take holiday, refresher training, ground duties etc. So the game has multipliers in for each aircraft size class. It cannot model like a charter airline where a plane may do 3 or 4 trips a week. It's assumed to be a commercial pax/cargo airline where utilization is vital.
The pilot and cabin crew staffing levels are the ONE area of staff that I think is quite accurate, but most of the rest are TOTALLY out of proportion. There is absolutely NO economy of scale.
For example, I currently have 289 aircraft (a pretty even mix of Medium, Large and V.Large) and I have 2670 pilots. That's only just over 9 pilots per aircraft, which is actually quite low. I'd have expected about 12 - 6 full crews for each. My Cabin Crew numbers are similarly low.
The problem comes with, as you say, managers and corporate staff as well. I have 743 Finance Staff. Most people in this kind of job would work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, but even assuming they work two shifts and cover weekends (requiring 3 staff per position) that's still 248 people in the office at any one time - just in that one department! So each one is only looking after around 1.2 aircraft!
Breaking down Ground Handling: I have around 25 departures per hour on average. With 2210 Ground Handling split into 4 shifts, that means 552 are on the apron at any one time. If we half this to take into account destination outstations, that still means that, if the average turnaround time is 1hr15 I have 29 aircraft being handled at any one time which is 19 ground handlers per departure!
The same is true of Technical and Maintenance. With 4070 staff it means that, even with 4 "shifts" to cover a 24hr day and holidays, each individual aircraft has around FOUR dedicated mechanics each.
I know you can't compare the figures here with any real airline as most of them contract out much of their labour, but even if you included the contracted people (mostly customer service, ground handling etc.) I doubt there is any medium to large airline anywhere in the real world with anywhere close to these staff levels. Maybe this is something that could be addressed next after the recent "fixes" to commonality and wages.
wrt to maintenance it would be super cool if you received a benefit for spreading your checks out over the course of a week and a day. So you needed less staff if you had a regular cadence of checks vs doing them all between 0-05 on Sunday.
Sunday? Surely you mean Saturday, at least the B checks?