HIDDEN AIRLINE INEFFICIENCIES

Airlines spend a lot of time, effort and resources on optimization. They must.

Despite all that, still several major efficiency factors regularly fall outside the optimization scope.

This is partly due to the way optimization is organized, for example with strong pressure on departments to sub-optimize.

Other inefficiencies remain undetected because of blind spots in profitability reporting.

The impact of this cannot be under-estimated; many airlines are sitting on substantial hidden inefficiencies.

Inadequate long term coordination of fleet needs causes slacks in available capacity. Misfits between planning of production, fleet mutations & maintenance checks form significant avoidable costs.

In profit reportings these stay out of the spot lights, being spread out over production by block hour allocations. More...

The costs of peak sensitive ground resources easily exceed 15% of total costs. A major blind spot in flight cost calculations is the use of flat fees for these categories.

However, the cost impact of flights is not flat: for one flight, it's zero, while others may take a full extra shift. Not taking this into account costs airlines millions. More...

In this industry, the urge to close a sale is large. However, a high load factor is not the same thing as optimal revenue.

Airlines under-estimate how bottleneck hub spokes or multi-leg sectors, group bookings and simple revenue displacement can undermine profits. More...

The most popular industry measures to improve punctuality are longer block times and longer turn times.

The cost of this is immense, while reality is that most of these extra buffers remain un-used; a waste that can be avoided with more intelligent buffer planning. More...

Too often models and expensive data give a false sense of comfort. They can even stand in the way of innovation.

For example when airlines buy back their own traffic information to find confirmation that they have served their markets optimally! More...