Maintenance
Your airline needs to schedule maintenance for each fleet of aircraft, leased or owned. The maintenance requirement is calculated using a mix of departures and total block time. Generally lots of short haul flying will require more maintenance since the aircraft is going through more cycles. Since maintenance is calculated on a fleet level you can add maintenance onto each aircraft, or use one aircraft for maintenance and others to fly.
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How to do maintenance
When you fly an aircraft, it requires maintenance. How much is determined by the number of flights flown (take-off cycles) and their flight time (airframe hours). This will create the need to give your aircraft maintenance. Many short routes will require more maintenance than few longer routes. To keep your aircraft in tip-top shape, make sure to give them enough maintenance time. There is a helpful graph on the right hand side of your View Aircraft page, but also a new page (Aircraft Maintenance) helps you out.
Note that each individual aircraft doesn't necessarily require maintenance, rather your fleet as a whole needs maintenance. This means you can fly one DC-9 24 hours while the other flies only 16 and is under maintenance the remaining eight hours. The busy people in scheduling will manage your routes so all aircraft will get equal amounts of maintenance. This does not work across different aircraft models yet.
Aircraft Maintenance page
You can see how your fleet is doing in regards to flight time, hours used and maintenance requirements. The maintenance ratio is a number comparing the maintenance hours required with the maintenance hours scheduled. One is best, while smaller is also good (it means you have scheduled more hours than necessary). A ratio larger than one is not that good, since you have scheduled fewer hours than necessary.
How to schedule maintenance:
Go to the View Aircraft page and select an aircraft with some hours free. On the right hand side you will see a slider.
Select an appropriate amount of maintenance. In case you have several bases, also select a base where maintenance will take place. It affects scheduling, but not maintenance cost - make sure your aircraft is where it needs to be maintained! Then click on create maintenance, the schedule of your aircraft will look like this:
Maintenance tips and tricks
How do you change/remove scheduled maintenance?
Simply click on Delete Maintenance and reschedule a new maintenance block of your desired duration.
Do all aircraft each need maintenance?
Each aircraft model has its own maintenance schedule. In the example above there are two DC-9s, but only one is actually scheduled with maintenance. It has scheduled enough maintenance time to cover the requirements of both aircraft - the second aircraft therefore does not need any scheduled maintenance.
Your busy scheduling office will take care of the details in scheduling.
Each different aircraft model will need its own maintenance - a DC-9-11 can't cover maintenance for your DC-9-21.
Do leased aircraft need maintenance?
All aircraft - even leased - need to have maintenance scheduled as described above. But who pays for maintenance depends on the lease type:
- Dry lease: The owner (lessor) pays nothing, the operator (lessee) pays for staff and maintenance
- Damp lease: The owner pays maintenance, the operator pays staff
- Wet lease: The owner pays staff and maintenance, the operator pays nothing.
- Moist lease: Yet to be seen...
Can I not maintain my aircraft?
You can fly aircraft without maintenance at all, but they will deteriorate faster and will cost your airline more in the long run.
How old should the aircraft be before they are retired?
It used to be 4-6 years before aircraft were too expensive to maintain. Today the upper age limit is much higher, but depending on your margins, you can probably keep on flying your aircraft for 20-30 years.
