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By Bjorn Fehrm

May 4, 2023, © Leeham News: In our series about the viability of the business plans for small airliners (nine to 50 seats), we have covered how energy and fuel consumption scales with the size of the airliner.

The cost factor we examine today is the maintenance cost for keeping an airliner fit for purpose and safe.

We use the Leeham aircraft performance and cost model to get the data for the maintenance costs for airliners going from nine to 200 seats.

Figure 1. The Cessna Sky Courier is a new 19-seat small airliner with conventional propulsion. Source: Textron Aviation.

Summary:

• The maintenance costs of an airliner scale differently from the energy and fuel consumption we studied last week.
• We discuss the scaling metrics for the airframe maintenance costs and how these differ from what drives engine maintenance costs.