A worldwide Part 135 operator where demand outstrips the fleet, every flight hour costs around $10k, and slots, permits and customs sit on every trip. OPTIRISE now proposes the day’s allocation every morning, and the team re-runs it as requests change.
More requests than the fleet can meet
This operator flies a homogeneous fleet of more than 25 long-range aircraft, just two types, each flying around 1,000 hours a year. The operation is worldwide, which makes flight time calculations and comparisons complex. With a cost base of roughly $10k per flight hour, every misallocated hour is expensive.
Demand is very strong, and fitting every request onto the fleet is difficult. Before OPTIRISE, the sales team was doing this by hand, rearranging the schedule like a game of Tetris, around the clock.
Clients book late and change their plans. Last-minute requests and special needs, from luggage to on-board services, arrive continuously and all have to be accommodated.
Option flights are used extensively: bookings are held until they are fully confirmed. Planning has to work around trips that may still firm up or disappear.
Every trip carries its own administrative requirements, which any schedule has to respect:
One run every morning, re-run when it moves
OPTIRISE went live four weeks after kick-off.
In this operation, the sales team is in charge of OPTIRISE. Fitting requests onto the fleet is where the daily decisions are made, so the optimisation sits with the people making them.
The day is organised around the optimisation:
Fewer empty legs, better-served clients
The savings come mainly from positioning flights that no longer need to be flown.
With each flight hour costing around $10k, removing unnecessary positioning flights has a direct effect on the cost base.
On one morning, OPTIRISE’s suggestions saved 34 hours of flight time. The team reviewed them together in the daily meeting and applied them.
OPTIRISE identifies upgrades that make financial sense, which the team uses to look after its best clients.
The daily Sales and Ops meeting now focuses on the key planning decisions rather than rebuilding the schedule by hand, and planning is more stable as a result.
“We all agreed this morning’s suggestions made sense. This system is very smart.”
Tell us about your fleet and your rules, and we will show you what OPTIRISE would do with them.
Other client profiles: Fractional fleet, North America · High-utilisation light jets, Europe