Econ 'Practice Flights' and Daily Flight Arrival Displays

Pilots,

Just wanted to add some additional information regarding the future of and effects on these pages with the new ECON-2018 project.

First the Daily Arrivals page has been updated to link all future flights using Econ and SPAACARs 10.5 to the new cost/revenue model for individual flight detail display (when you click on the pilot id for the flight in the listing on the main SPA home page). This will show the same information of flight detail as the flight detail on the ECON-2018 flight detail page when you click on an individual flight on the Center Activity page.

The Practice Flights page is another matter and is really a bit of a mess at this point. It is a combined pile of old and new flights with various cost/revenue models and is basically useless for any kind of comparison whatsoever. Therefore I'm thinking it's time to retire that data and start over again with the current Econ Model flights from the 2018 project. At least then the data will be meaningful to some extent for comparison (all the same cost/revenue model at least). As it currently stands, the data is of little value and won't even display correct individual flight data for newer flights using the ECON2018 cost/revenue model. I want to correct this so that it will display all current Econ Practice flights made using the new version of SPAACARs with Econ mode set. Until this is done, you can still see the actual Econ Flight detail for your current flights for the two days they appear on the SPA home page in the Daily Flight Arrivals area by clicking on the pilot ID field for that flight. This will all be corrected in due time, but this method at least allows pilots to fly some practice flights using the new Econ model while trying different aircraft in their hangars to see which plane might work best for a specific flight before actually trying to fly the 'official' econ flight where your results will be 'permanent record'.

Lastly, all pilots must be advised that the current setup of the new econ cost/revenue structure is only designed to work with smaller aircraft with a lower max takeoff weight. Flying large commercial aircraft will produce ridiculously high numbers. This will also likely be corrected in due time when those type of flights are included in the Econ -2018 official flight schedules. Still, you can fly those flights and they will eventually be logged into the practice area too, and as the cost/revenue model changes to accommodate the larger aircraft, it's possible that the resulting data can be updated so that it will be preserved during these future improvements as we move forward with the ECON2018 Project.

Thanks for your participation, support and patience.

John<br /><br /><!-- editby --><br /><br /><em>edited by: jer029, Mar 17, 2018 - 08:40 AM</em><!-- end editby -->

Let me just amplify John's points in the above post. The current version of the Econ 2018 algorithm was explicitly developed for aircraft with MTOW below about 20,000 lbs. We know that both the revenue and cost models will have to be different for larger aircraft, because that's what the data we are using shows. The basic underlying reason for the difference generally lies in what is commonly referred to as "economies of scale". The economics of running a small regional airline are radically different than those applying to a national or international scale commercial operation. In the spirit of "walk before you run", we have rolled this out in the context of the sorts of flights you will see in the current Juneau hub schedule. When you use these algorithms to analyze the flight of a 777 on the New York to Tokyo route, you are going to see unrealistically high operating costs per passenger mile and we would have to make the revenue sources (e.g., ticket costs) unrealistically high to support these costs. Accordingly, we will have to develop either two different models or a much more sophisticated model to incorporate medium regional, national and global operations. As John says, you can continue to check the econ option for these flights in SPAACARS 10.5 and see the results on the Econ Practice page in the test mode, but don't expect to see reasonable results when you do, both because of the clean-up work John has referred to and because we know that the model does not apply to operations of larger aircraft. Before we make any changes in the initial model, we will need to accumulate some experience with it which we can use to inform further development. We appreciate your patience as we go through this process and welcome your feedback about the model, as applied to the scheduled flights which are and will be listed for the various hubs on the econ 2018 page.

Mike

Practice Flights area has been updated now to show only the current ECON2018 flight data (ie. flights using the newest SPAACARS with econ mode set), regardless of the flight numbers used. Please note that the economic data for flights made with larger aircraft will change when the cost/revenue formula is updated to accommodate the larger aircraft. These changes will be reflected in both future Econ flights and retroactively to those already shown on the practice page. Until all adjustments are made to the econ formula, the average and total revenue amounts will skewed until this can be adjusted. Currently the data will show correctly for smaller aircraft (below 20000 pounds Max Takeoff Wgt) that might be considered for use in the current official Econ flights. This will allow pilots to use this practice area for test flights using non-official flight numbers to see how their aircraft performs using the new Econ model.

Thanks,

John<br /><br /><!-- editby --><br /><br /><em>edited by: jer029, Mar 19, 2018 - 12:19 PM</em><!-- end editby -->