EA301MAA - Airline Route and Fleet Planning

Top Up Module – March 2018

Assignment tips

1. Get started as soon as possible. A lot of what you do in the assignment will help in the
exam. Also, you may find that your first choice of airline/destination is not suitable and want
to start over with a different set of parameters. Ensure you have enough time for a couple of
iterations.
2. When choosing your airline make sure you have access to its current schedule, fleet, aircraft
configuration, current ticket pricing, strategy statements and a full set of up to date
financials via the annual report. Ideally you would also want some additional information
available in the form of journals, CAPA articles etc.
3. Origin - Destination traffic data can be found in a variety of places: Government tourism
websites, tourism authorities, airport activity report and country economic reports (CIA,
World Bank, CAPA etc)
4. Aircraft performance can generally be found either in journal articles or from the
manufacture’s website. In many cases suitable payload-range diagrams can be found as well
as indications of fuel burn per tonne of payload/RPK/ASK etc
5. Network feed in both directions is important to build up a demand estimate and therefore
capacity requirement. You need to ensure that traffic connecting over the hub makes sense
in terms of maximum and minimum connection times, when considering network feed. Use
revenue proration (worksheet 5) to build up yield and revenue data.
6. For fuel costing you can work up from the manufacturer’s performance data on burn per
tonne of payload/RPK/ASK etc. Base crew costs on likely aircraft utilization and crew set
requirements. Estimate annual salaries but include payroll on-costs such as allowances (for
expats) or National Insurance contribution etc (for nationals) and pensions/provident
funding etc. For aircraft cost I suggest use new aircraft pricing. You can use either a
mortgage or operating lease arrangement for aircraft costing, but be sure to use a sensible
duration for the financial arrangements and if you go with a mortgage purchase be sure to
note any residual value.
7. While you have only identified 5 of the DOCs involved you should have gained some feel for
the economics of your proposed route. You can test your decision to go or no-go by
comparing your route RASK against the published network figure derived from your airline’s
financial statements.
8. Try and be as honest and insightful as possible in your PLP. Do you feel confident you really
understand the principles of route and fleet planning? Which parts of the module did you
feel were useful and/or interesting and which parts were not? Does any of the content
inspire you to study these issues further?

Good Luck!