A fast-growing Part 91K fractional operator, owners guaranteed short-notice availability, and a fleet and crew ruleset specific to the operation. OPTIRISE now builds the schedule days ahead and rebuilds it whenever the day changes.
Billions of possible schedules, one planning team
This operator runs a fractional program of around 50 aircraft. The operation is centred on North and Central America, with part of the fleet redeployed to the Caribbean or the Rockies in season, where some airports require long, specific turnaround times.
On busy days, each aircraft flies up to five legs. Across the fleet, that produces billions of possible ways to assign trips to aircraft and crews. A planner can compare a handful of options. The best schedule is usually one nobody had time to look at.
The fleet is growing fast, and the goal is to absorb that growth with the same planning headcount. At the same time, co-owners hold short-term availability guarantees, so requests arrive at short notice and have to be honoured.
Every schedule has to respect a detailed set of fleet and crew rules:
Built days ahead, rebuilt when the day changes
RISE implemented OPTIRISE in twelve weeks from kick-off to go-live. That time was used to encode the operator’s own fleet and crew rules, agreed in the scope of work, so that every scenario the engine evaluates is one the operator could actually fly. Support continues after go-live for new needs and edge cases.
OPTIRISE handles both fleet scheduling and crew pairings, so aircraft and crew decisions are optimised together rather than one after the other.
The ops team runs OPTIRISE. The schedule is built from the ground up several days in advance, then re-optimised whenever the situation changes:
When an aircraft becomes unavailable without warning, the AOG module rebuilds the rest of the day as a whole. Instead of patching the next flight, then the one after, the team gets a complete, feasible day to review.
Fewer empty legs, a steadier schedule
Within twelve weeks, deadheads went from 33% to 29%. The savings come from positioning flights that no longer need to be flown, and from decisions the team no longer has to make under pressure.
Around $200k is saved on deadheads every month. On average, one deadhead is avoided every day, by connecting a passenger leg directly with the next passenger leg instead of flying the aircraft empty in between.
Upgrades are proposed every time they make financial sense, within the operator’s own thresholds.
Because the schedule is built days ahead and re-optimised rather than patched, planning is more stable, and fleet growth is absorbed by the same team.
Tell us about your fleet and your rules, and we will show you what OPTIRISE would do with them.
Other client profiles: Global long-range charter · High-utilisation light jets, Europe