Evaluating airliner performance, Part 2

By Bjorn Fehrm

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Introduction

Sep. 24 2015, ©. Leeham Co: In the second part of our series about comparing and evaluating economic and operational performance of airliners, we look at the parts beyond fuel that make up the Cash Operating Costs (COC) for an airliner.

While fuel consumption, crew costs and aircraft maintenance costs can be evaluated in a way which closely resembles reality, other costs in the COC are too complex to model in their true form.

This is the case for underway or airway fees, landing fees and station fees. Here, just about every country/airport in the world has taken the liberty to invent its own charging principles and formulas.  With several hundred different formulae for these charges, the way out is to use industry-accepted approximation for these costs.

Summary:

  • We establish how crew cost are modeled for our evaluation missions, taking into account the complex world of work time regulations for pilots and cabin crew.
  • We also describe how we handle airframe and engine maintenance costs and how these get allocated to our missions.
  • Finally, we describe how the complex underway and landing/station costs are modeled with the accepted approximations these require.

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