How to make the long haul work?

[Seattlepilot]

I have experimented with running long haul service between two major cities about 5000 miles apart. With A330-200 i had to lower the prices to a very low level to make a decent DOP. Even with that i wasn't able to produce 12,000,000 /month lease work.
Are there any tricks to make the long haul work with leases? My strategy has always been to get bunch of aircraft on lease and then get rid of them once the routes are profitable by replacing them ..

[dktc]

Let's put it this way...

any lease of above 8 mil lease rate simply won't work.

[Seattlepilot]

dktc,
I sure understand it but without any way of financing new aircraft, how is one supposed to get into buying new airplanes? I cannot imagine ordering one aircraft at a time for each month.
Leasing comes in as a big help for growth but it makes more sense for narrow body airplanes than wb.
Say, i have a leasing rate of 3mil/month on a Fokker. At 200,000 DOP it still produces enough cash flow to purchase the airplane and replace the leased one. You can never have this kind of a method for a long haul aircraft. That's why i was wondering if there was a trick..

thnks

[Kerdmass]

Generally speaking, long haul (especially 3k or greater) is not a nice profit source when it's owned; to say nothing of leased.

The same plane running multiple shorter routes will be much more profitable.  (well, maybe not a 400+pax plane where turnaround time is a huge issue)

[lhenning]

If you want to grow fast you should not get in to the longhaul buissinies. For example my transatlantic A319 make less money than those I operate inside Europe and that is from smaller airports, say like 2million pax to 7 million pax. 

[dktc]

dktc,
I sure understand it but without any way of financing new aircraft, how is one supposed to get into buying new airplanes? I cannot imagine ordering one aircraft at a time for each month.

It is very easy to make money in AM, and a lot of players would agree. All you need is a bit of patience.
As said above, running short routes are quite profitable... and there are so many airports in the game that you should be able to start quite a number of short routes.

So... the key to financing new aircrafts in AM is through your retained earnings, instead of financial leverage.

[mashimaro_1]

For me longhaul has never been about profits, more about presitge  .

I know the profits lie in shorthaul routes but it's just so much more fun playing with longhaul routes. Although you have to be careful with MX costs.

[LOT 737-300]

The key is to usually operate cheaper aircraft. This is possibly easier in the older worlds like World 9 than in the more modern ones I guess, since you do have long haul types that can be cheaply bought that have decent capacity (at least for their times), like the Tu-114D or the BZ-308. I'm not sure how well this would work under the current game script, but have you looked at the A310? I remember when I first played the game, it was in the 2000s, an I did pick up a few old Airbus A310s. They did wonderfully for me on my longhauls out of RZE (though I wouldn't operate them from there now unless I was to go to O'Hare, Beijing or Atlanta). I'm not sure how much is different now from then, especially with this huge jump in MX Costs now, but I would assume it's worth buying into.

As said before, if you want to grow into a big carrier, it'd be best to buy more into short hauls as well. My airline in World 9 is made up of a huge mixture of IL-14M, Yak-40, Tu-134/134A and AN-24V to help me gain good profit from Europe/African/Mid Eastern routes.