Network Planner

You are the chief executive of an airline that does not exist yet.

You have $1,400,000, one gate, and no aircraft. Air Canada flies Calgary a dozen times a day. You will fly it twice. Anyone who needs to be there by 9am is going to fly them, and no amount of cleverness changes that.

But not everyone is that passenger. Leisure travellers choose their dates around the price. They will take a bad departure time to save forty dollars, and the incumbents cannot chase them without wrecking the fares they charge everyone else.

That gap is your entire business.

What you actually do

• Choose a base. Toronto puts millions of travellers in reach, charges $876k for a gate, and is somebody else's fortress. Halifax is cheap, unguarded, and may not have enough traffic to keep you alive. This is your difficulty setting.
• Lease aircraft and build each one a day of flying. Every tail has a registration and a real timetable. Pick its stops, its first departure, how many times it repeats, and get it home before the 01:00 curfew.
• Fight for seats. Market share comes from frequency and price, weighted differently for business and leisure travellers. You will never win the business half. Learn to stop trying.
• Be cheaper than they can afford to be. High-density cabins, unbundled fares, a single fleet type. Every one of them trades goodwill for cost.
• Build a hub. Passengers connect through your base when an arrival is followed by a departure at the right moment, and a through passenger outbids a local for the seat. Two routes barely work. Four compound.

Things that will go wrong

Rivals add flights when you take too much share. Fuel wanders between $0.68 and $1.48 a kilo and decides whether your cheap thirsty lease was clever. Halifax peaks in July and craters in January; Vegas does the opposite, and two markets that peak in the same month are not a portfolio. New York has five slots a day for a new entrant, so the richest market on the map is the one you cannot flood.

And you cannot sell a seat between two American cities, because that is cabotage. Fly the leg if you like — it just will not earn anything. This is why real long-haul flying is shaped the way it is.

Notes

Everything is built on real geography: great-circle distances, Natural Earth coastlines, real ICAO codes for the carriers you are fighting. The economics are tuned rather than sourced — if you want the real numbers, they are free from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics and Statistics Canada.

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