I’ve never really thought before about how much money it takes to have an airline before other than “loads”. Bonza has/had 6x Boeing 737s. Assuming a discount purchase price of about $80 million each, you can get an airline off the ground for under a billion dollars. I think that’s less than I would have assumed.
I wonder now what it really costs per seat to operate? Let’s simplify economy airline tickets to $100 per hour of flight time. Let’s also assume that a plane spends a quarter of the time on the ground. So, 18 hours in the air at $100 per hour times 200 seats means a plane is generating $360k revenue per day.
I have no idea what running costs are - flight crew of 10? Lets double that to 20 for maintenance/customer service etc. Fuel? Maintenance? Airport fees? No idea what these add up to, but if you have over $2 Million dollars coming in per day as revenue, I have to assume I’m missing stuff here. Because I would not have thought an airline this small would have running costs that high. There’s probably a good reason why I’m not running an airline!
You aren’t going to be able to do back of the napkin math on that one, it’s an incredibly complicated business.
There’s a reason most airlines have failed and many of the survivors have needed government bailouts. And the reason is not mismanagement across the board, although there’s plenty of that, too.
I’ve never really thought before about how much money it takes to have an airline before other than “loads”. Bonza has/had 6x Boeing 737s. Assuming a discount purchase price of about $80 million each, you can get an airline off the ground for under a billion dollars. I think that’s less than I would have assumed.
I wonder now what it really costs per seat to operate? Let’s simplify economy airline tickets to $100 per hour of flight time. Let’s also assume that a plane spends a quarter of the time on the ground. So, 18 hours in the air at $100 per hour times 200 seats means a plane is generating $360k revenue per day.
I have no idea what running costs are - flight crew of 10? Lets double that to 20 for maintenance/customer service etc. Fuel? Maintenance? Airport fees? No idea what these add up to, but if you have over $2 Million dollars coming in per day as revenue, I have to assume I’m missing stuff here. Because I would not have thought an airline this small would have running costs that high. There’s probably a good reason why I’m not running an airline!
I’d love to see what these numbers actually are.
You wouldn’t need to even buy the planes?
You might even be able to lease them.
Airport fees are expensive. Landing at melb for example I know costs a bomb which is why Avalon exists.
You aren’t going to be able to do back of the napkin math on that one, it’s an incredibly complicated business.
There’s a reason most airlines have failed and many of the survivors have needed government bailouts. And the reason is not mismanagement across the board, although there’s plenty of that, too.