My 5 Cents

[massynrc]

Howzit Guys,

I am totally in love with FS Airlines. It is now just almost a year since I started using it, and I love it! Herewith my few ideas for possible consideration.

• I feel the Maintenance needs to be jacked up. I hardly have to do any maintenance on an airplane. I think in a years time I haven't even booked one plane in yet, just because there is almost no to little wear. Perhaps that should be bumped up a bit to allow for this to happen more frequently? Especially in a "simulation mode"?

• I would love to see costs involved with the cabin etc. Although we can change seating arrangements, maybe that should cost money to adjust every time as a cabin refurb needs to happen? And with that we can maybe have options on the cabin layout etc? Big Shiny TV Screens or no tv screens? And that can influence PAX happiness and income?

Keep up the great work!

Regards,

Reinhardt

[joefremont]

Hi Reinhardt,

Interesting suggestions. As for your idea "I feel the Maintenance needs to be jacked up. I hardly have to do any maintenance on an airplane." I think many would disagree with that, just the other day I was having a conversation with another long time member who was complaining how frequently he had to do maintenance.

Your seating idea is interesting. I guess I always assumed that airlines had warehouses full of seats to pull from and all their employees had to do was unbolt the old seats and plug in the new ones, so there was no cost of time constraint to changing configurations. Seat types were also kept simple, business that was twice as big as economy and first that was twice as big as business and assumed to be the fold down sleepers.

But following your line of reasoning, it could lead to a lot more grades of seats, cabin interiors, ect. Maybe even a whole market on seat types. Could get quite complex, I wonder how others would like it.

Any other opinions?

[Cat]

A "Private Luxury Class" seat would be something that might be explored as biz jets don't make jack which is why we stopped flying them. We can make more with a Cessna Caravan or Quest Kodiak than we can with a Citation biz jet. We even sold our BBJ as once Joe took away the extra cargo capacity, it was also a money making dog. I would also certainly put a limit on how many PLC seats could be added to any specific aircraft, another task that will require research and man hours. AND the entire passenger database would have to be adapted to recognize the new type of passenger.

Maybe a better idea would be a substantial fee to increase the ticket factor on private executive aircraft? Much like the freighter conversion, this would be easier to implement. ($XYZ x lb) for 2x the current ticket factor for a "custom luxury executive interior", the fee would be tied directly to the MTOW of said aircaft. [Edited after read back} = This however would require new "executive types" in FSA to discern the difference between a tricked out airplane and a stock one.

We also have asked our pilots to stop playing with seatings on our main line aircraft. Our staff sets the seats for each aircraft for their mission - we have some that are "sports charters" (all biz/first), some that are regular 3 class cabin, etc. I would not be in favor of a fee for changing out seats as with some aircraft that is preferred, such as the Cessna 206, Cessna 208 Caravan, Quest/Daher Kodiak, Pilatus PC-12, Boeing 737C (Combi / Quick change seating). Now if the system could determine which aircraft can have seats pulled quickly for no cost, then maybe.... as line aircraft need both time and labor to change out seating arrangements. With the current package cargo system now, people are pulling seats to add one more package which pays more... so there is that whole little chess game going on as well that would be impacted by seat change fee's.
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As far as maintenance costs go, we have spent $17,419,254 this year alone at our Las Vegas faciilty at 25% cost saving us $52,257,762 over full price.
Add in the cost of the facility per month and we have spent another $18,225,000 to keep that facility open year round.
at $1,822,500 per month, a large facility is a big expense and we don't have enough jumbo's to justify an extra large facility.

We do require annual inspections / A-Checks in our airline however and FSAirlines only requires an A-Check every 24 months.

We are leaning to a requirement whereby every hub fleet in our airline must have/maintain at least an office ... that will add some expense to the equation. Again it comes down to having a platform that is flexible enough for each airline operator to establish their own unique style of virtual airline and I think FSAirlines does this better than anyone.

[joefremont]

One thing that interested me about the seat idea was not so much the cost of swapping out the seats, but the cost of the seats themselves. You could even have several types of seats, several types of economy/business/first from basic economy to luxury private cabins some with QC options having different costs to purchase and time and/or cost to install or remove. Maybe when you replace those economy seats with first you can store the seats in a warehouse for later use, then when you want to switch back, it does not cost much at all as you already have the seats, but if you want to change to all lie flat business class seats and you don't have any you have to buy them, and it gives reasons for airlines to get warehouses so they have a place to store there unused seats.

[jato0072]

What about instead of costing money, the reconfiguring seats cost time:

1 minute per seat?
2 minutes per seat?
5 minutes per seat?

Combi Aircraft would get a significant bonus (much shorter time penalty).

That would mitigate the gaming of the seats / packages at every destination.

[Cat]

by joefremont » Tue Oct 27, 2020 7:06 pm

One thing that interested me about the seat idea was not so much the cost of swapping out the seats, but the cost of the seats themselves. You could even have several types of seats, several types of economy/business/first from basic economy to luxury private cabins some with QC options having different costs to purchase and time and/or cost to install or remove. Maybe when you replace those economy seats with first you can store the seats in a warehouse for later use, then when you want to switch back, it does not cost much at all as you already have the seats, but if you want to change to all lie flat business class seats and you don't have any you have to buy them, and it gives reasons for airlines to get warehouses so they have a place to store there unused seats.

So how would the system determine the difference from say biz class / first class on a "normal flight" to super fancy biz class / first class seats that are add-on's? If there is no difference, only the ticket prices then competing airlines with cheaper "standard" seats will get first call on pax at any given location.

[joefremont]

So how would the system determine the difference from say biz class / first class on a "normal flight" to super fancy biz class / first class seats that are add-on's? If there is no difference, only the ticket prices then competing airlines with cheaper "standard" seats will get first call on pax at any given location.

I would think each seat type would have a ticket factor, size factor and cost. You can think that the current seats are:

economy size 1, ticket 1, cost 5000
business size 2, ticket 2, cost 10000
first size 4, ticket 4, cost 20000

But maybe we added:
Economy basic: size 0.9 ticket 0.75, cost 3000
Economy plus: size 1.25 ticket 1.5, cost 7500

of course there would have to be a good deal of logic on the server side as to how much extra someone would be willing to pay for that extra plush seat. On that one hour flight between SFO/LAX or Paris/London they would be less willing to pay extra for that comfort that they would in the 5 hour SFO to JFK and even more for that 15 hour flight from SFO to Sydney.

Another complexity is that we already have some built in factors that let smaller or special aircraft use business class seats as there default seat (see Business Class Factor and First Class Factor on the aircraft type info page) so I would have to figure out how this more complex system would work with that or what would have to replace it.

the more I think about this the bigger of a project it sounds, so there would have to be a good amount of interest in it before I would consider it.

[Veteran]

You could consider that those seat changing can only be made in a maintenance center.
Furthermore maybe another type of seat could be included for medical transportation. Of course this seat should reduce the number of available seats similar to the first class, as these have to be transported laying down.

[Cat]

To be honest at this point in time, FSAirlines has gotten so complicated it may be turning off newest users who try to wade through all of the features.

I would suggest a moratorium on new features until the backlog of current things get cleared.

Just my opinion based on data / comments from my tutorial video's.

[Yury_EEA_Flyer]

Personally i think it would bring more realism to FSA work. Now we have to check our aircrafts one time per year, so it would be more realistic to check it 1 time per 3 months, for example, if you didn't wear them out