Aircraft on ground fees.... (off my rocker)

[MMattyK]

I consider myself off my rocker with this suggestion but here goes.

We have a large fleet and few pilots, as have a number of airlines out there. As a result, a number of our fleet haven't been airborne for some time. They are not making us any money, yet nor are they costing us anything to maintain. It might be a bit of an incentive to either get pilots flying, making cheaper aircraft available to blossoming airlines, or more competeitive leasing rates available, if a charge was made for (say a set pecentage) for aircraft not flown for a set period, say 30 days, or a monthy percentage degradation in serviceability.
Overall, it may mean less work for the admins having to supply new aircraft orders... your thoughts on the idea

[tjbaughn]

I consider myself off my rocker with this suggestion but here goes.

We have a large fleet and few pilots, as have a number of airlines out there. As a result, a number of our fleet haven't been airborne for some time. They are not making us any money, yet nor are they costing us anything to maintain. It might be a bit of an incentive to either get pilots flying, making cheaper aircraft available to blossoming airlines, or more competeitive leasing rates available, if a charge was made for (say a set pecentage) for aircraft not flown for a set period, say 30 days, or a monthy percentage degradation in serviceability.
Overall, it may mean less work for the admins having to supply new aircraft orders... your thoughts on the idea

I believe someone has already mentioned a "Tie Down Fee", but I bet it would be hard to come up with a fee for each airport like in the real world. But then again someone put a lot of time entering the fuel cost for each airport

[Quantum]

Hi,

It all depends how you are using FlyNET and with what intentions. I see some VA's that build large fleets with the intention of trying to be the biggest and most valuable so that they can sort of plant a flag and say look at us. They wheel and deal with aircraft between other VA's and get a buzz out of accumulating billions of v$ in their banks.

At CBFS we do have a large fleet of aircrafts and a lot of the time they are parked up doing nothing at all, but they are all there for a reason. We fly older 'Classic' aircraft and they make just a modest profit. The routes for each of the aircraft are carefully researched and we provide a service to our pilots by providing them with the correct aircraft and the correct routes flown by them. All our aircraft wear authentic registrations for the specific types to try and make things 'as real as they get'. When another freeware flight sim model that fits our profile becomes available then we do our research, file the flightplans, buy the aircraft and register them appropriately. A lot of our pilots fly at 1x sim rate and are quite happy to potter around in a slow, low seat capacity aircraft turning in just a small profit. Why? Because they are enjoying themselves FLYING! We may well be in the minority on this and if this suggestion were to be adopted along with other suggestions for additional charges that have previously been made, then at some point CBFS may be unable to continue operations on FlyNET if the economics became such that we couldn't continue profitably.

Rgds

John

[MMattyK]

The idea wasn't with the intention to attempt to price anybody out of the game, and I totally appreciate that 'we' fly for fun, but with the ability to order aircraft of any particulay type and have it available without having to scrabble for them on the open market anymore...
We have lots of aircraft ourselves that are 'gathering dust' from the venerable Rapide and Heron, through the piston era and up to modern day wide-bodies, and just think it might encourage us to try and make more effective use of our fleet available to offset any costs the fleet may incur sitting on the tarmac.
Anyway, it was just an idea to see how others thought about it

[IslandBum]

John

I totally agree with you - we at VHA are in the exact same position - our fleet is all classic variety and our pilots enjoy flying not leasing acft or
making obscene and unrealistic amounts of money. The reason they fly vha is they enjoy flying older aircraft - why should we be penalised
because we dont care about the "game" side of Flynet but prefer to use the client to give purpose to our flight??? - For the same reason we
dont participate in the "leasing" game of Flynet.


Leif