Creating Virtual Airline Routes by Jim Kohan, CEO Great Lakes Express

Transcription

1 Creating Virtual Airline Routes by Jim Kohan, CEO Great Lakes Express I founded Great Lakes Express (GLE) in January 1997, making it one of the longest running Virtual Airlines in existence,. We were one of the first regional airlines, focusing our operations on the US Great Lakes region. We currently operate 4 hubs (KCLE, KROC, KMDW, KMSP) and 355 routes, serviced by a fleet of 41 Beechcraft B1900D and DeHavilland Dash 8- Q400 aircraft. GLE pilots are able to use substitute aircraft as they desire. This document covers how I typically setup routes. This process is nearly identical to how the initial GLE routes were setup in December 1996, with the only difference being most of that research was based on paper route tables. GLE operates a basic hub-and-spoke route system. We do feature consolidation flights from our four hubs to real-world hubs in the East Coast / Great Lakes region to accommodate those pilots that are looking for longer range flights and pure jet operations. GLE uses VAFinancials as our VA Management / Reporting system, but other than the last Step or two, this document is generic enough to be used with any VA operations system. Step 1: Pick/Create a Hub. This should offer sufficient passenger demand and be appropriately located. Step 2: Capture real-world routes from Internet. I use FlightStats ( to get a list of Arrivals for ALL real-world regional / feeder airlines operating from that airport. While I personally do not like copying a realworld airline verbatim (I believe it takes much of the originality out of a virtual airline) I do use routes as a starting point, and as we ll see, I will mix up the order, city pairs, and aircraft to suit my ideas. Below we see SkyWest flights arriving into KMSP from 12:00 to 00:00. Use the Hide Codeshares radio button to remove duplicate entries from this list.

2 Step 3: Copy this information to Microsoft Excel or your spreadsheet of choice. Step 4: Spend much time tweaking / cleaning up the information so it s more usable. The most important item in this step is to remove duplicate cities.

3 Step 5: Sort the cleaned list by Origin airport, remove the real-world ETD and ETA columns (you can always use the URLs in column 1 and column 2 to get back to FlightStats for that info if needed), and add columns as needed. You ll see I ve added columns for Distance, and different aircraft models, with the value in parentheses being the cruise speed in km/h. Step 6: Using I look up the real-world distance and ETE values, given at this point in GLE operations we are not using the real-world aircraft for most flights. Basically this allows me to do a conversion from pure jet speeds down to turboprop speeds. Below is flight info for a B1900D flight from KMSP to KDSM. From this we learn the distance is 202nm, and ETE is 1:03. If you are not familiar with Great Circle Mapper, it s great tool. In my example, I am only using 2 city pairs, but by adding other airports to the list, you are able to build entire routes. It has a drop down list of aircraft types, or you can manually add aircraft range and/or aircraft speed.

4 Update the Excel spreadsheet with the distance and ETE information as it s collected. Step 7: Once I m done collecting distance and ETE information, I go old school. For Great Lakes Express, I want my standard hub-and-spoke flights to be no longer than 1.5 hours, with the majority between 30 and 60 minutes. Cruising at altitude on auto-pilot just isn t my thing. Using a rule, compass and pencil, I select destinations from the Excel spreadsheet and map them to ensure that my flights that 1) are less than 90 minutes long, 2) offer good 360 degree coverage for that hub, and 3) don t require me to buy / lease too many aircraft. The one thing I ve stopped doing is drawing that 90 minute flight time range indicator on the paper, as I have this marked on the ruler. Below is the original route structure for Great Lakes Express KMSP hub.

5 Step 8: After collecting this information for each flight, drawing my route map to ensure good coverage, I return to Microsoft Excel to build my actual VAFS flight schedules. I typically assign 4 or 5 city pair, hub-and-spoke type routes per aircraft each day, resulting in 8 to 10 flights. I typically schedule flights to start right around 06:00 LOCAL time, and end between 18:00 and 21:00 LOCAL time each day. GLE pilots are not required to use the scheduled times when they fly. The image shows me building the actual routes with departure and arrival cities, ETD, ETA, and ETE information added in. This allows me to figure how many legs each aircraft is able to do and still fit into the 06:00 to 21:00 workday. I typically use a 30 minute turn-around time for each flight. Below are the flight assignments for one GLE B1900D, with the workday going from 06:00 to 20:00. Step 9: Once this has been completed, I add some VAFS required columns and get the information ready for batch upload. VAFS gives you the ability to batch upload up to 50 flights in a single text file. You can see I ve added columns for Hub ID, Fleet ID, Flight #, and Flight Type. Hub ID is the numeric value of the Hub this flight is assigned to. This value is generated by VAFS, so you must have an existing hub in place before adding these flights. Fleet ID is the numeric value of the Aircraft this flight is assigned to. This value is generated by VAFS, so you must have an existing aircraft purchased or leased before adding these flights. Flight Type options are as follows: SP = Scheduled Passenger, SC = Scheduled Cargo, CH = Charter, and MI = Military. NOTE: Before creating the.csv (comma separated value) file that will be uploaded to VAFS, remember to remove the header row. Step 10: Upload this information to VAFS, or import into your ACARS of choice.