Making a loss on long haul flights!

[eshanamin]

I recently fely a route from EGCC (Manchester, UK) to WMKK (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ) and make £500,000 loss.

I was using a a380 with 464 passengers on board and my company is 'normal' i.e. not low cost.

I know that as distance increases ticket price increases but there must be a limit as my ticket revenue for this was the same as for a flight
to Dubai (approx half the distance) using the same plane.

Could you tell me how ticket income is worked out?

Also what aircraft do you use if the distance is long such as london to singapore

[Igor (EY0106)]

income is worked out by amount of passeengers and distance flown although after a certain distance the price is the same. So lets say that certain
distance is 400 miles (eg the real distance is bigger then that) so i fly 400 miles and i earn $700 then i do a flight which is 800 miles but instead
i earn $500. You may ask why but since the limit was 400 miles i stopped earning money at that point and was actally losing it. Your income altogether
depends on if you served food or drinks plus the fuel plus ticket prices and add passengers. So technically i can earn more money off a shorter flight
because the amount of fuel used is taken off the money earned. Some long flights dont pay off. Sorry if i confused you but im on final to sarajevo
which is a warzone and am approaching fast in my A330-200 so i need to type quick goodluck.

[poden]

In reality of course, aircraft travel on great circle routes. If I'm not mistaken, FSP computes the point-to-point distance from departure to
destination using a SPHERICAL earth (since spherical trig calculations of distance on the earth's surface are rather simple, just using longitude and latitude). In FS2004 however, the flights are actually simulated on a series or mercator projection cylinders, each of which covers a sector of
longitude. This makes long range flights artificially much longer than they would be in the real world (great circle navigation doesn't actually occur
in FS2004) and also much longer than the spherical earth calculation used to compute the point-to-point distance. This effect is not much of a problem on short distance flights, but is much more pronounced on long-range flights like from England to Malaysia. The aircraft model likely has an artificially long range to compensate, and make it still capable of reaching that distance, but the simulated distance in FS2004 you have to fly is
much longer than you would fly in reality. This runs you into the "maximum distance for increasing revenue" barrier in FSP much sooner than you would on a spherical earth model.

Of course, this is something they won't be addressing in FSX (or ever, most likely), since Microsoft doesn't really seem to care about an issue a lot
of people aren't even aware of.



Post Edited ( 05-23-06 17:13 )

[Gray_Lensman]

poden wrote:
... (great circle navigation doesn't actually occur in FS2004) ....

I don't agree with that statement, because if you fly some of the longer historical flights such as Lindbergh's or Earhardt's Atlantic Solo
flight's and follow the direction in FS2004, you will find that you are gradually flying a great circle and slowly changing your compass
heading to do so. Now this may not be so apparent on faster flights, but it is readily apparent on these slow historical reenactments and
the flight engine is the same for both the reenactments and the modern flights you may be flying.

[poden]

Gray_Lensman wrote:

poden wrote:
... (great circle navigation doesn't actually occur in FS2004) ....

I don't agree with that statement, because if you fly some of the longer historical flights such as Lindbergh's or Earhardt's Atlantic Solo
flight's and follow the direction in FS2004, you will find that you are gradually flying a great circle and slowly changing your compass
heading to do so. Now this may not be so apparent on faster flights, but it is readily apparent on these slow historical reenactments and
the flight engine is the same for both the reenactments and the modern flights you may be flying.

Its true the flight paths LOOK like great circles, but they get projected onto essentially a flat map, and at high latitudes, the east-west scale
distortion becomes quite large. This implies that great circle routes passing through high latitudes have to fly longer distances than they would on a
sphere. The thing is, I've read this, but I haven't actually tested it myself. Maybe I'll do an experiment where I take a plane up to the "polar
barrier", and just fly along it in an east-west direction (with unlimited fuel), and see how rapidly I can tick off degress of longitude.

[Igor (EY0106)]

well can i makea suggestion for flying the A330-200 for long range flights my A330 with about 260 pax and 20K of freight can fly for 3-4 hours on 20%
fuel i think that might be a little unrealistic but im not complaining