Maintenance Center Profits

[joefremont]

A member asked me in the last few days if there was a way to know if a maintenance center was profitable. That made me thing, we need some sort of report on that but as I did some research I ran into some problems.

For the most part there are two tables in the database that could help figure that out.

First there is of course the transaction table, every financial transaction that happens in the system is recorded there, including the one that the VA owning the aircraft paid for the maintenance and the one the VA owning the center paid to perform the actual work, the difference between the two is the profit. One problem with this is, is while there is a reference on the transaction to the aircraft that was maintained, there is not a reference to the center that did the work.

There is a table that shows maintenance queue for that center, which links the aircraft to the center and controls process of performing the maintenance. While I originally planned on creating a purge program to clean out records 30 days after the maintenance is performed, I never got around to it so most of them are still there. Most I say because the way I linked the queue record to the center and the aircraft, if either the center or the aircraft is deleted, so are the related records in the queue (keeps the database clean of unneeded entries). This means that if I were to go back and try to recalculate all the revenue for the centers, I won't be able to calculate for aircraft that had been deleted, which surprisingly is a lot of aircraft. So most likely any number I end up calculating will be inaccurate, and a number that is wrong is probably worse than no number at all.

So my choices are:
1) Calculate a report that will be missing data.
2) Calculate a report that starts from now (or when I finish the report) but will be missing everything from before .
3) Nothing, leave it as is.

Opinions?

[Zissiz Zekapten]

Choose a date and start from there. Could be 1st september, 1st january, ...

[Alan McGaughey]

Doesn't really affect me but I'd say the logical option would be number two.

[joefremont]

I was starting to work on this, and ran into a conundrum in how to report profit on a maintenance center.

When figuring out profit on maintenance done for other airlines its simple. The other airline pays a given amount, the cost of the maintenance is a given amount, the profit is the difference.

But what about when its done for your own airline? Maintenance done by FSA Aviation is 100% of the baseline, maintenance done by your own fleet is 25% of the baseline and if the aircraft is of the same fleet it always pays that 25% baseline price, you can set a markup for other fleets but still what is the profit? But on the problem of maintenance on aircraft in the same fleet is the profit
- 0% since no additional revenue was earned?
- 75% since that is the difference between what FSA Aviation
- Or is it the difference between 25% and what ever the lowest alternative at that same airport?

The world wonders?

[joefremont]

Ok I answered by own question and there is now a simple page to show some totals for each maintenance center, I have done my best to go back and recalculate past maintenance but if aircraft have been deleted I can't include that income, but some numbers are better than none.

So in the finance section you will see a new option "Airport Center Summary", for each center you will see four columns with numbers.

Expenses: This is the cost of opening the center and its ongoing rent.
Income: This is the net income from operations.
Profit: This is the sum net income and expenses.
Savings: This is the profit adding in what you would have paid had you paid full price for maintenance on your own aircraft.

Here are a couple examples, say you build a large maintenance center which costs 16,200,000 to open. You sent a rate for others of 40% and an A320neo is sent in for maintenance, the normal price for an A-Check is about 1,231,000 of which the aircraft owner will pay 492,400 and will cost the center owner 307750 so the 'Income' would be 184,650. If the aircraft and center were owned by the same VA then the savings would be 923,250 which is what they would have paid had the paid full price for the service. Granted after this first transaction the total profit will still be -16,015,350 and savings will be -15,276,750 because you just opened it and have only had one transaction, but its a start.

At some point I will add a detail page for individual center so you can profit or loss over time, but thats a later step.

Note, 'Savings' is just an estimate as its looking at who owns the aircraft now. If the AC has been sold or scrapped that will change the numbers.

[Cat]

Maintenance Centers will never be profitable in this environment, the monthly rent is way too high. It's just a cost of doing business in our airline. In most cases with smaller VA's, the smartest move is to find someone else to service your airplane(s) instead of taking the big hit on a maintenance center or paying full price. There are tons of airlines just giving away service to other airlines for 25% full price.

[joefremont]

Maintenance Centers will never be profitable in this environment, the monthly rent is way too high. It's just a cost of doing business in our airline. In most cases with smaller VA's, the smartest move is to find someone else to service your airplane(s) instead of taking the big hit on a maintenance center or paying full price. There are tons of airlines just giving away service to other airlines for 25% full price.

This is true, if your looking at just 'profit', very few make sense. None of mine did and looking at the airlines I have linked to as partners very few of them are profitable either. But when you look at savings, taking into account how much you would have spent we have some centers that have certainly proven there worth, and a few that do not. My VA had 5 centers, now we have 3 and we probably only need 2.

I fully expect that after more VA's see that page, there will be a lot fewer maintenance centers. For reference at this point in time there are 1527 maintenance centers on the platform, lets see how many there are in a week.

[jato0072]

What about limiting the number and/or size of Service Centers depending on the size of the airport?

Does KLAS need 10 Service Centers? How many are there on a typical large airport IRL?

[Cat]

Major airlines usually have their service centers at their main hub(s). Although I would imagine in this day and age of outsourcing, a giant place like LAX would have several third party maintenance companies to service out of country aircraft that cannot fly home without said service. Quick Google search of KLAS shows at least 6 FAA certified Repair Stations with 2 of them also being FBO's Atlantic Aviation and Signature Flight Support. But again, in our virtual world, we can have multiple airlines with their main HQ/hub in the same location where that is usually not the case in the real world.

We are down to 1 Large at our main hub of KLAS and all fleet aircraft in the country must fly back to KLAS for their service before the status reaches 96.5% per company policy. This is to leave a buffer so we don't get sucked into a much more expensive B Service 3 day down time.

In our world we do not have random "no go" mechanical issues on the ground so there should be no need to have to find emergency service away from the hub. But that is not the case in the real world. Mechanical things break, usually at the most inconvienent time and place too.

No one flying in the virtual world is going to be happy with any kind of "random breakdown" generator program and be forced to sit a day or more until their problem is resolved. Example: Hard landing - 650 pops the main tires and the aircraft is now red tagged for 24 hours until A check is performed on the spot. (Delta 757 Atlanta this week is example - did an on-runway evac so now not only do tires and gear have to be fully inspected for damage and parts replaced, all those emergency slides must be reloaded - to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each).

[joefremont]

I always assumed market forces would limit the number of maintenance centers at an airport, rather than a few airlines building up to the limit and than charging hit rates. Now that its easier to see how much money airlines are loosing on there centers I am pretty sure that number will go down.

Sam is right that

No one flying in the virtual world is going to be happy with any kind of "random breakdown" generator program and be forced to sit a day or more until their problem is resolved.

Although it is an interesting idea.

[Cat]

At some point years ago FSA did have in flight emergency issues when the aircraft status was left to decline past acceptable limits. Landing gear stuck up, engine failure, etc. But one would have to really run the airplane status down for it to trigger. But that was also in the era of a limited number of sim formats. Long before XP10, P3D and of course FS2020.

On another note, it would be interesting to see FSAirlines apply big status penalties to persons flying with crash detection turned off and landing gear up. In FSA, all it see's is the descent rate at touchdown, there currently is no cross reference data point to note that nice butter landing was on the belly. LOL whats that sound? Oh balls, gear down and the plane stands back up and we taxi to the gate. Smooth. Erase the voice recorder, maintenance don't need to know about this.

[joefremont]

At some point years ago FSA did have in flight emergency issues when the aircraft status was left to decline past acceptable limits. Landing gear stuck up, engine failure, etc. But one would have to really run the airplane status down for it to trigger. But that was also in the era of a limited number of sim formats. Long before XP10, P3D and of course FS2020.

On another note, it would be interesting to see FSAirlines apply big status penalties to persons flying with crash detection turned off and landing gear up. In FSA, all it see's is the descent rate at touchdown, there currently is no cross reference data point to note that nice butter landing was on the belly. LOL whats that sound? Oh balls, gear down and the plane stands back up and we taxi to the gate. Smooth. Erase the voice recorder, maintenance don't need to know about this.

We do still have the inflight failures, but if you keep your status above 98% you don't see them, and with the new client a very very hard landing will be come a crash. But as of now I don't know how to determine if crash detection is off, but I will look again.

Edit: in the last 90 days there have been 125 flights where a random failure was generated.

[Cat]

You wouldn't have to determine if crash detection is on or off. "landing gear down" should be a flag on touchdown. If it is not down, Houston we have a problem. Fixed gear aircraft would always have to be set somehow in the system to have "landing gear down".

[joefremont]

You wouldn't have to determine if crash detection is on or off. "landing gear down" should be a flag on touchdown. If it is not down, Houston we have a problem. Fixed gear aircraft would always have to be set somehow in the system to have "landing gear down".

Unless its an amphibian doing a water landing, in which case the gear should be up. Right now we don't have a setting in the database for if the aircraft can do a water landing. Looking through the SDK documentation for SimConnect and FSUIPC there is a property for 'you can get for Surface type' which may only work in airports but may not be supported in MSFS and who knows if XPUIPC supports it for X-Plane. Looking through the documentation I also don't see a way to see if the aircraft can float in water.

But in principle I agree that gear up landing should be a problem and the simplest approach may be to add an amphibian/sea plane flag (yes/no) to the aircraft database and if we see a gear up but no gear down and its not an amphibian give a gear up penalty. I will do some testing.

[Cat]

Regarding Maintenance Center Profits: Why do VA's keep giving away service to other airlines for free? By offering service to anyone and everyone at 25% they are making $0 money on the jobs. I mean I don't mind, as it gives me no incentive to build and maintain my own maintenance center in my little personal Michigan charter operation.