Substantiation of a long-distance aircraft operating costs dynamic assessment criterion

Аuthors

Opryshko Y. V.

Moscow Aviation Institute (National Research University), 4, Volokolamskoe shosse, Moscow, А-80, GSP-3, 125993, Russia

e-mail: opryshko_yuliya@mail.ru

Abstract

The main indicator of an airline carrier competitiveness is air tickets low sale price as long as safety and comfort standards are observed. Accordingly, aircraft manufacturers face an urgent problem of producing an aircraft least-cost in operation. The existing operating costs assessment criteria do not allow for environment versatility, ICAO restrictions, various passenger capacity, and other factors. It leads to unacceptable errors when assessing passenger plane operating costs.

The paper pursues an objective of developing a criterion, considering prime operating costs, ICAO restrictions, various passenger capacity and course speed, as well as environment inconstancy.

According to ETOPS regulations the flights of the planes equipped with two gas-turbine engines must be performed in such a way that in case of the failure of one of the engines the flight duration with one operating engine to an emergency airfield from any flight way point under conditions of zero wind and speed set for the flight with only one operable engine would be 60 minutes for non-ETOPS aircrafts, and up to 270 minutes for Boeing 777.

Thus, the only true criterion, which is able to assess a long-distance passenger plane operating costs objectively, is flight cost value per one passenger.

The cost of one ton of the fuel, labour cost of flight technicians, flight crew together with flight attendants, currency rate, airdrome fees etc. are not constant over the total lifespan of an aircraft. Thus, there is a danger that the flight cost value indexes would display unacceptable error when comparing aircrafts with differences in performance and economic characteristics.

Thus, to assess operational costs objectively we recommend use dynamic cost value as criterion, which is calculated, not at the current level of fuel and lubrication materials prices, labour costs of flight attendants and flight crew, currency rates and airdrome fees stakes etc., but based on average predicted values over the total lifespan of an aircraft.

The obtained value of dynamic price value of a flight per one seat is of probabilistic nature and has a certain default level associated with predictive values of a certain number of indices. However, the accuracy of cost accounting in this case would be much greater, than when using static cost value of a flight hour, or the cost of either ton-kilometer or passenger-kilometer.

Keywords:

operation costs, ICAO, ETOPS, costs of flight per one seat, criterion of compare, long-distance flights regulations by planes with two ETOS, ICAO restrictions, environment versatility

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