Booked Flight Not Flown Causes Late Packages

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Cat
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Booked Flight Not Flown Causes Late Packages

Post by Cat » Fri Feb 19, 2021 11:29 pm

One problem I can see cropping up is that the package shelf life is shorter than the booked flight shelf life. So if a pilot books a flight, loads it full of packages and sits on it, those packages, especially priority packages, will go outdated and there's nothing an airline can do about it except cancel the pilots' flight and have the airline take the cancellation fee loss.

I think the booked flight time is too long - and it locks out aircraft inventory and packages for days at a time. If an airline has to cancel a pilots' flight because that pilot sat on it and didn't fly it, I think the pilot in question should get billed and not the airline.

Just my opinion as I look at priority pacakges accepted 3 days ago locked out on a booked aircraft.
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Cat
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Re: Booked Flight Not Flown Causes Late Packages

Post by Cat » Sun Feb 21, 2021 1:12 am

UPDATE: The flight "cleared" from it's booking status in 3 days, a full 24 hours after the priority packages "expired". I simply picked them off the aircraft in question once the flight cleared and added them to a larger aircraft load to absorb the loss as a profit reduction instead of an outright loss on the smaller aircraft had I flown it.
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fackprod
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Re: Booked Flight Not Flown Causes Late Packages

Post by fackprod » Sun Feb 21, 2021 3:33 pm

And perhaps that is the role of the CEO/VA Manager. Not every business decision returns a profit. Minimising the loss as described is a sound strategy I too have used. Our virtual ideal can sometimes be overshadowed by real life events as opposed to lack of thought/training or simply greed. Next step is to monitor for repitition and respond appropriately. Maybe we do not need to create a technical fix for something that may not be broken.

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joefremont
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Re: Booked Flight Not Flown Causes Late Packages

Post by joefremont » Sun Feb 21, 2021 6:04 pm

Originally, the flight expiration time was 24 hours, but there were complaint, especially from those who like to fly long flights at 1x where there sim would crash and there was not time to redo the flight before they had to return to real life, or even at all. If you were doing a flight that took more than 12 hours it might be impossible to redo the flight and meet the 24 hour from booking to cancel it. So eventually the timeout got bumped to 48 then 72 hours, at which point the complaining stopped. Dropping it back to 48 hours I don't think would cause too much hardship. I have also been thinking about reducing the cost of releasing packages and making it easier to do so, but that will take a little time.

My current project are some updates to the VA XML interface, more about that later.
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Cat
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Re: Booked Flight Not Flown Causes Late Packages

Post by Cat » Sun Feb 21, 2021 7:17 pm

This was more of an observation than a true complaint and it is very low priority and after review, I have to agree with the post above that not everything makes money.

Virtual airline execs must sometimes choose between the lesser of two evils. Very appropriate post, fackprod, thanks. 8)

Pilots sitting on booked flights is something that could/should be handled internally within the VA, not by overall "government regulation" of FSA.

I would not change the release costs, I would keep it prohibitive so it is a "last resort option" instead of first call.
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