Fleet Commonality | AirwaySim Documentation

For your airline to be economically viable, the aircraft fleet must be carefully selected. This does not only mean choosing the correct aircraft type for each route, but ensuring that your aircraft are as similar as possible to ensure maximal fleet commonality.

By definition, fleet commonality is the economic and logistic benefit of operating a standardized fleet of aircraft that share common parts, training requirements, or other characteristics.

Fleet Groups

Aircraft are grouped by their manufacturer and model into fleets in AirwaySim. A single fleet is generally a single aircraft model or several models of the same sub-type.

For example, Airbus A318, A319, A320 and A321 are all of the same fleet group.

The aircraft within the same fleet group share the same flight time properties, so any routes between the aircraft within the same fleet group are interchangeable without changes in the route schedule, and as such you also plan the route for the entire fleet group when opening/editing it. The fuel usage and other performance characteristics will of course then vary between the individual aircraft sub-types, of which you can read more here.

Each aircraft fleet group your airline operates costs the airline in terms of crew salaries and training. There are also fixed maintenance and administrative costs for each fleet group to model the training of the maintenance staff, availability of spare parts, and for other tasks like manuals, regulative fees and other paperwork.

As a rule of thumb, the more fleet groups your airline operates, the larger & more profitable your airline must be since every fleet type you add increases your fixed commonality costs.

When you start a new airline, it is essential to choose the correct aircraft fleet group for your operations and stick with it, until your airline grows.

How large your airline has to be before adding another fleet type into operation depends entirely on your business plan, and area of operation. Generally speaking, have at least 5 to 10 planes of the same type in operation before adding another fleet type since otherwise the fixed will eat the profits.

Engine Types

The aircraft have also different choices of engines, and some aircraft types can have engines from several different manufacturers.

The same commonality concept as within the aircraft applies also to engine types.

The engines are not related to the aircraft types, so the same engine, for example CFM56 series may be found from A320, A330 and B737 aircraft and they are consider common to each others since the base engine model is the same.

Commonality Costs

You can view the details of your fleet, and the fixed costs associated with them from the Fleet Commonality page.

Please be aware that within the present aircraft fleet commonality cost model, it is very rarely feasible to have more than 3 or 4 different aircraft fleet types.

Aircraft placed in long-term storage are free of all commonality related costs.