A380 Engines

[LemonButt]

I've got a fairly large A380 fleet and a small handful of 747-400's I've been phasing out.  Check out the screenshot below of the fleet commonality page.  Basically, 4 CF6 engines on my 747 cost the same amount as 1 GP7200 engine.  Anyone know if this is the same for the RR Trent variant also?  This seems high to me that I'm paying almost $5 million to maintain 4 engines (which is actually more than the $4.5 million monthly lease).  Anyone know why it costs so much?

[Sigma]

First off, and this is important, the bottom line description is actually incorrect.  You are not paying $1,210,000 per month per GP7200.  You're paying a fixed $1,210,000/month for all your GP7200s.  The "/GP7200" part is incorrect.  Otherwise, you're right, you would be paying some absurd amount for maintenance.

As an example, I'm running ~350 Wasps in the Early Days game at a claimed cost "per month per Wasp" of ~$500K.  If that were the case, my engine maintenance alone would be $175,000,000 per month.  In fact it's more like $3,000,000 for my total maintenance, and most of that is the planes not the engines.  Only $500K/month of that is engines.  If it cost what it claimed to cost to maintain an engine, in the Modern Times game, my Fokkers would cost 1 billion dollars a month just to maintain their engines.  Clearly that's not the case.

As for the remainder of what you're posting about and the price difference, it's simply economies of scale.  Each engine added to your fleet doesn't  increase the maintenance by X dollars, it's on a steeply decreasing curve.  That's why, though you have 8 times as many GP7200 they're only costing you about 4 times as much.

[LemonButt]

First off, and this is important, the bottom line description is actually incorrect.  You are not paying $1,210,000 per month per GP7200.  You're paying a fixed $1,210,000/month for all your GP7200s.  The "/GP7200" part is incorrect.  Otherwise, you're right, you would be paying some absurd amount for maintenance.

As an example, I'm running ~350 Wasps in the Early Days game at a claimed cost "per month per Wasp" of ~$500K.  If that were the case, my engine maintenance alone would be $175,000,000 per month.  In fact it's more like $3,000,000 for my total maintenance, and most of that is the planes not the engines.  Only $500K/month of that is engines.  If it cost what it claimed to cost to maintain an engine, in the Modern Times game, my Fokkers would cost 1 billion dollars a month just to maintain their engines.  Clearly that's not the case.

As for the remainder of what you're posting about and the price difference, it's simply economies of scale.  Each engine added to your fleet doesn't  increase the maintenance by X dollars, it's on a steeply decreasing curve.  That's why, though you have 8 times as many GP7200 they're only costing you about 4 times as much.

It makes sense it's not per engine now I think about it--is this being fixed?

[swiftus27]

I like the way I put it in my NEWB Manual in the forum.

For every engine type there is so much fixed cost.  You have to own the right tools for every engine you own.  You have to own a the manuals.  You have to have the spare parts on hand.  Your techs have to be able to fix all types of engines.  You have to fly their trainers in to work with your guys.  

If you own one type of engine, you will simply have one set of tools/manuals.  

You guys percieve engine maint as a variable cost only.  It is fixed + variable.  

When Mazda came out with the RX8, Chrysler with the Crossfire....  The stores had to spend a TON of money just to be able to take care of them.  And that didn't include the spare parts they needed to keep on hand.  The engines were just so radically different from those they normally maintain.

[EYguy]

The fixed monthly cost i for your entire inventory of engines (of course, for THAT TYPE!). The only thing i would suggest you is that next time you buy the A380, you should switch to RR engines: from what I can remember, the Trent series of those engines has commonality with the same Trent series of the B777 so could yo save tons of money...