FSAirlines

I just released the new Maintenance Center feature and I wanted to describe how it works.

Maintenance centers allow you to repair your aircraft at a reduced rate, but a center can only work on a limited number of aircraft at a time. As always if there is no maintenance center available or you do not want to wait for space in an existing center you can always pay the full price and the system repair aircraft without delay as before.

You can build a center, they can be one of four sizes.

Small
Build cost: 1,600,000 v$
Maintain up to 8,000 kg (2 size points)
Monthly Cost 200,000 v$

Medium
Build cost 14,400,000 v$
Maintain up to 72,000 kg (6 size points)
Monthly Cost 1,800,000 v$

Large
Build cost 32,400,000 v$
Maintain up to 162,000 kg (9 size points)
Monthly Cost 4,050,000 v$

Extra Large
Build cost 57,600,000 v$
Maintain up to 288,000 kg (12 size points)
Monthly Cost 7,200,000 v$

The build cost includes buying the building and equipment plus hiring all the staff. The monthly cost includes all the costs needed to keep the center open. You may note the monthly cost is roughly the standard cost to maintain one aircraft of the centers maximum size, and the build cost is eight times that. In order to build a maintenance center you must have 'advanced finance' active.

Once the center is built it can maintain aircraft at 25% the standard cost. A center can work on a number of aircraft based on what I am calling size points, an aircraft's size points are calculated as the square root of the dry weight of the aircraft divided by 2000, rounded up. To calculate the weight from size points, the formula is points squared times 2000kg, so one size point is from 1-2000kg, two is 2001-8000kg, etc. So an extra large center can work on one A380 or twelve Cessna 172's at one time (or one 747-400 and two C172's).

Here are some of the size points for some of the more popular aircraft in the system.

Cessna 172 - 727kg, 1 points
Beech Baron 58 - 1,760kg, 1 points
Cessna 208B Grand Caravan - 2,336kg, 2 points
DeHavilland Canada DHC-6-300 - 3,200kg, 2 points
Beech King Air 350 - 4,320kg, 2 points
Douglas DC-3 - 7,323kg, 2 points
ATR ATR-72-500 - 12,950kg, 3 points
Bombardier DHC-8Q-400 - 17,185kg, 3 points
Lockheed L-049 Constellation - 25338kg, 4 points
Boeing 737-700 - 37,648kg, 5 points
Airbus A320-200 - 41,244kg, 5 points
Boeing 737-800 - 41,413kg, 5 points
Boeing 737-900ER - 44,676kg, 5 points
Airbus A321-200 - 46,856kg, 5 points
Boeing 757-200 - 62,100kg, 6 points
Boeing 767-300ER - 90,011kg, 7 points
Airbus A330-300 - 119,831kg, 8 points
Boeing 777-200LR - 145,149kg, 9 points
Boeing 777-300ER - 167,829kg, 10 points
Boeing 747-400 - 178,756kg, 10 points
Boeing 747-8I - 220,128kg, 11 points
Airbus A380-800 - 270,364kg, 12 points

While aircraft owned by the same fleet as the center always pays the standard 25% rate, owners can set different rates from 25%-100% for aircraft of other fleets in the same VA, partner airlines or other airlines. The fleet owning the center would then keep, as profit, the difference between the cost the owner of the aircraft paid and the standard 25% cost.

Once a center is full, other aircraft will be in a queue to be worked on. Once one aircraft is finished, the first aircraft in the queue that can fit in the center will be started.

At any point, you can close a center and the monthly cost will stop. Aircraft currently being worked on will be finished, but any aircraft in the queue will be removed from the queue. A closed center can be reopened for twice the monthly cost.

If you no longer want the center, you can scrap it for half the cost of building it.

For the sake of simplicity I did not add features for buying and selling maintenance centers between airlines, but could do so in the future if there is the demand.

Very nice job Joe!!

Very good Joe..

Sweet! We will be opening a Large in KLAS and a Medium in KBOI .... :) Look for our Grand Opening Discounts soon!
QUESTION: Will airlines get any sort of notice when other airlines "book a service" at one of their centers? I'm trying to set up our independent finance sheets .... not sure if we will need in/out dates to show how speedy our new crew is. LOL

Las Vegas & Boise now offering 50% off Grand Opening Sale to all airlines!

Cat wrote: ↑Sun Mar 10, 2019 1:46 pm Sweet! We will be opening a Large in KLAS and a Medium in KBOI .... Look for our Grand Opening Discounts soon!
QUESTION: Will airlines get any sort of notice when other airlines "book a service" at one of their centers? I'm trying to set up our independent finance sheets .... not sure if we will need in/out dates to show how speedy our new crew is. LOL

Right now there are (or should be) notifications to the VA owning the aircraft that work has started or you have been removed from the queue. I could add a notification when a aircraft from a different airline books service.

At first I did not add anything to estimate when work would start on an aircraft, given that smaller aircraft can slip in before larger aircraft is space is available figuring out when a specific aircraft would start is more complex than I first though so decided not to do it at this time, although as I think about it I probably will have to as I just though of a possible issue where smaller aircraft in the queue could delay larger aircraft already in the queue that I will need to fix.

First come, first served regardless of size would be my thought. If a 737 is in the middle of a line of Cessna's at a Medium, it would have to wait until more space in the hangar opens but the little guys behind should not be able to "jump the line" ... so it would delay the aircraft behind it but at the same time, this would make operators like us have two facilities, one we have mostly for GA/regionals in Boise, the Large for our mainline jets in Las Vegas. The Boise facility will be our jet "overflow" if Las Vegas gets backed up and there is not much going on in Boise.

Owner/Operators are going to have to share some of the responsibilities too in scheduling their fleets accordingly.

Even with some teething bugs (which the cheaters will find a way to exploit), this is going to add a really cool part to the overall product. Great work!!!

OHH one more quick question: will the discount price (if any) lock in to outside airlines at time of booking the service? So say a facility gets backlogged by offering Grand Opening pricing, if they change the rate, the guys in line should still get the first deal but anyone after gets the new rate..... make sense or getting too picky?

Yes the rate is locked in. Once in the queue either the aircraft owner or the center owner can remove an aircraft from the queue, but if the rate is changed while the aircraft is in the queue they still get the original rate.

I agree that later aircraft in the queue should not delay aircraft earlier and will try to get that working correctly soon,

Is there a chart/table available that shows the service costs on all aircraft types? If I knew where to find the data, I could make one.... something simple in Google Docs with a link for anyone to view......

OK I put one of our own planes into our new Maintenance Center for service and it says "pending" ..... so how long do we wait before service actually begins?

[img]https://i.imgur.com/0IVykFa.jpg[/img]

I have been working on fixing a few issues with the scheduler so you may have gotten a few extra messages that your aircraft are being worked on.

I also moved up the completion time of all the jobs by a day so I can see the scheduler run again and advance all the other AC through the queue. I hope nobody minds getting there ac back sooner.

It would not be too hard to create such a spreadsheet with all the costs, it probably should be on the page that describes the aircraft type, well that part at least is going onto the todo list.

Yeah I was gonna ask about our "test dummy" clearing so fast but never mind...... hey one thing also, we are not seeing anything in Finances regarding any maintenance transactions. Will "in house" fleets be serviced at cost (25%) with no money changing hands? I thought FSA was getting their cut off each service, hence the 25%. Maybe I am misunderstanding .... I thought the service center was charged 25% by FSA and they could then charge whatever they wanted to other fleets/airlines up to 100% standard pricing. But "in house" fleet aircraft are serviced at cost. yes? no? LOL some confusion on a newly rolled out system is expected.....

For aircraft of the same fleet as the center, there should be one transaction per aircraft. For other fleets there should be two, one for the center to pay for the actual repairs, one for the transaction between the aircraft owner and the center owner. I was having some problems and deleted a bunch of transactions because I was re-running the scheduler and it was having, well, issues, and extra transactions were generated. I will dig into this in the morning and see whats happening.

Edit: Found out why the transaction was missing and fixed it.

If you need me to make more test runs with other fleets to check the cross fleet service feature, just let me know, happy to help if I can.