![[OC] How Airplanes Make Money Proforma](https://preview.redd.it/k7rfa5ior3ad1.png?auto=webp&s=640167621916131c4e68b8468a44f781c43c0670)
I would guess it's all the labor an airline pays for that isn't actually on the airplane, divided by the number of airplanes. Maintenance crews, baggage handling, ticketing, management, administration, IT, telephone agents, etc.
"The employee-aircraft ratio in an airline depends upon the number of in house functions performed by the airline. The employee per aircraft ratio in Air India is 263 whearas it is 150 in Jet Airways, 59 in Jetlite, 111 in Kingfisher, 118 in Spicejet, 185 in Go Air and 102 in Indigo. "
From some random document from The India Ministry of Civil Aviation. So yeah, airlines have a lot off staff for each plane they operate that don't include the staff on a plane. Ground crews, customer support, gate agents, etc.
Air Marshalls too
Well, the air marshal "expense" is basically the same as not filling a first-class seat.
I wonder if baggage and maintenance staff are employees of the airline or of the airport.
Speaking as a baggage staff, usually it’s the airline. Even the smaller airlines. I do not know of a single spot that it’s by the airport, unless the airport only has one airline. There are contract companys for baggage handlers, but they’re also contracted to the airline, not airport.
In Europe, it's the airport that contracts the baggage staff, unless the airline-airport contract puts the plane-touching staff as their own, but (AIUI) this is very rare.
Exceptions may be where an airline has the complete use of a terminal - e.g. Terminal 2 in Dublin for Ryanair.
I don't think that's true in Portugal. At LIS, for example, there are two baggage handling companies, Groundforce and Portway, that work with different airlines. This comes up whenever the workers of one of them go on strike and you have to go find out if the airline you're flying on works with them.
I don't believe this is accurate as I am scheduled to fly out of terminal 2 tomorrow on Aer lingus. I also think I have flown into T2 on Delta before.
Usually airport. At least every Canadian airport has been a company contracted by the airport.
However, the fees airlines pay to airports may have the labour listed separately for easier tax accounting. Labour may be tax deductible or qualify for additional tax credits.
AFAIK in the US most baggage handlers are airline employees. This is why when two people fly to a given airport at the same time on different airlines they can be waiting by the baggage claim for very different lengths of time.
US Baggage handler employee here. Were employed by the airline. Most are. There is one big company outside that that is contracted by the airlines. None are by the airport. At least not in the US, tmk.
I know someone who has worked at both YYZ and another that worked at YUL. Both handled baggage from every airline that used their designated gates.
Yeah but that's usually contracted by the airline not the airport. The gate just happens to be a shared gate used by a bunch of airlines that don't fly to YYZ or YUL more than once or twice a day so they contract it out and call it a day. If Swissport is the only contractor currently at those airports which is pretty typical it would make sense they would all talk to Swissport. Nothing stopping them from bringing their own crews though. A based airline would usually have their own ramp crews.
Quick napkin math says Delta's CEO pocketed about $22 per flight in 2023 based on his comp (35 mill) vs Delta flights (1.6 mill)
That’s irrelevant to this graph. This is only operating p&l and excludes overhead. The 40k profit per flight is before paying for their entire corporate office.
To put that a different way, an airline needs to fly a fully booked plane for 8,750 hours every year just to break even on their CEO's salary alone. There are 8,760 hours in a year.
And we all know every airline only has 1 plane, so this checks out.
Of course we can fly you to Miami. Oh no, I'm sorry the plane is in the sky, we cannot.
Of course we can fly you to Miami. Oh
I want to go to the other Miami
So long as shareholders continue to see revenue/profit growth or dividends seems like a solid deal
Or you know, as long as they have more than one airplane...
Pocketed would be incorrect. A fair amount was in stock.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown of the additional labor costs (e.g. maintenance, sales, marketing, etc) but it’s a departure from the rest of the graphic in that many of those other costs aren’t the same sort of “per flight” expenses.
Maintenance would be in that bucket but sales and marketing would actually come out of the gross profit.
True, but this graphic isn’t an income statement, it’s representing figures found by a study done using “benchmark data from multiple sources” for a 10-hour flight. I’d assume the paper went away from GAAP for the sake of simplicity and readability
Edit: it also says using no overhead, so would require a reading of the report to know for certain how they structured and derived the data
Customer Service Agents, Ops Agents, Ramp Agents, Provisioning Agents, Station management, Mechanics, Parts/Tooling Personell - airline staff on the ground and physically at the airports. (Variation can occur depending upon airline and airport)
From a remote and/or centralized location: Crew scheduling, aircraft dispatchers, customer service phone line, Aircraft scheduling, meteorologists... More that I can't think of at the top of my head.
That's not including people not directly involved with that flight - trainers, admin, IT, auditors, etc.
But I am guessing that these are a single bulk section because they aren't working a single flight for the duration of the flight in the way that crew does. A CSA does very similar amounts of work on a 2 hr flt as on a 10 hr flt. A dispatcher may stay with a flight for the entire duration, but they are working multiple flights at once.
I would guess plane maintenance, repairs, and inspections.
Ticket counters, airline operations and ground agents, passenger call centers, IT and website solutions, marketing and route planning, passenger customer service reps, ticket agents, ground service equipment operators like deicing, baggage handling, water trucks, lavatory trucks, catering vehicles, and flight kitchens, training staff and certifications, building and equipment lease contractors, lawyers, etc...
There's a lot of people behind the scenes at an airline
We certainly hope so anyway
Litterally every people working for the company that are not on the flights, the lack of split on that is indeed dissapointing, who knows how much is going to maintenance, operative in airports, marketing or whatever
I am skeptical of a few other things as well...
- With $250k in revenue and ~$40k in profit, that means there's about a 16% return. 16% seems pretty fucking amazing. I'd like to see more data on the total view of an airline.
- I don't buy that "other revenue" only accounts for $10k. I am pretty sure one of the reasons that they started charging customers for luggage is to both profit off of passengers but to also discourage passengers from bringing luggage and sell more capacity as freight/shipping.
The graph assumes a full flight. All it takes is a few empty first or business class seats and your profitability plummets.
There are other external factors like weather and closed airspace that will incur more expense as planes detour around those areas
I would think that $40k of profit also needs to fund all the overheads that aren't linked to particular flights, which could be quite substantial.
The other revenue may be low because it's a long haul flight and long haul carriers still tend to provide food/luggage etc in the ticket price.
This is a fairly long and fully booked flight, they probably eat a loss on some flights, particularly if they just have to shuttle them empty
Remember thats gross profit, not net. There’s a ton of overhead not related to the plane itself to take into account.
This is a long haul flight with a substantial amount of first class / business class revenue. I'm sure for shorter domestic flights, the % return is much lower -- and that's the bulk of an airlines flights by volume.
And yeah I doubt this is including things like marketing, admin / executive pay (generally those aren't part of gross profit in accounting). That would eat into that pretty quickly.
FWIW I took a quick look at Delta's financial statements for 2023. And it looks like they are pulling ~20% Gross profit (so actually higher than your 16% number here). That then gets cut down to ~10% after including admin costs. (So corporate, marketing, etc). Then down to just under 8% after interest and other expenses. So a total 8% net income after everything.
An 8% return really isn't that much -- given how volatile airlines can be (hello COVID, hello Oil crises).
I would think that $40k of profit also needs to fund all the overheads that aren't linked to particular flights, which could be quite substantial.
The other revenue may be low because it's a long haul flight and long haul carriers still tend to provide food/luggage etc in the ticket price.
One of the sources here is a post on stack exchange. If you go read it, the contributors are throwing around all kinds of guessed numbers based on their own assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. Internet discussion boards aren't credible primary sources for industry numbers.
I'd take this whole figure with a large dose of salt.
I agree, the pilots cost 4k and everyone else costs 58k? Who and how many are in this huge bucket.
Cargo in commercial flights is missing here, and no, it’s not under “other revenue”
Isn’t most cargo shipped via specific cargo planes and not in commercial flights?
Air Freight is about evenly split between dedicated freighters and extra space in the belly of passenger planes. Per https://www.statista.com/statistics/535543/worldwide-freight-ton-kilometer-share-belly-cargo-and-main-cargo/ it looks like 53% dedicated freighter, 47% tagging along with passengers in 2019.
Nope.
Cargo goes in every plane hold.
When covid hit and airlines said they were losing money, it was only most lost from pax. They were still making millions moving cargo
Money hand over fist back then. I remember loading a 777’s hold and the cabin to the brim while the operator was just seeing dollar signs fly past their eyes.
what was loaded into the cabin? did the seats have to be taken out first or did y'all just load boxes wherever they fit?
did the seats have to be taken out first or did y'all just load boxes wherever they fit?
Picturing a plane crammed full like a college student's sedan in August.
i mean it is kinda true, doing a duckduckgo image search for "covid seat cargo" shows examples, but some airlines removed seats as well. found a quote that one airline filled close to 1 milion seats with cargo.
No, this is the real reason why you need to pay for larger/additional bags. You’re taking away space for cargo.
Interesting. Never knew this
Also why saving fuel is such a big deal. If some innovations saves 2%, that doesn't just mean they save $1500 on fuel, it also allows significantly more cargo.
No, and this is why they justify charging baggage fees. Because this is cargo weight that they would otherwise sell in the belly.
Tons of fresh food goes all the time, I'm from Hawaii, we send fish to the mainland all the time. Where does all the sushi come from in Idaho brah?
Sushi in, pertaters out
It's specifically for the most profitable 10 hr flight, I think most luggage is then already included in the seat price.
That's nearly a 16% yield right there which is artificially high for nearly all airlines. Most are close to 0 or negative though with wild volatility quarter to quarter (Panam went nearly 17 years without a profit before their big liquidation). Delta has been managing high single digits at best (and generally lower) with American/United sitting near zero or negative though it varies between international/domestic. I don't see debt servicing on this graph either which should really be present as that's a significant part of operations.
This is just aircraft net margin though. Not airline.
Airlines would have a lot more costs like leasing buildings, buying equipment, certifications, trainings, benefits, etc
Airspace costs, too. Flying across the EU can cost thousands. Most airplanes from the US to the EU take a more-north-than-optimal route because 1) Canada is cheaper to fly over and 2) flying directly into the country of destination is cheaper than over multiple districts
Really? I've always read that flying north is the optimal route because of Earth's curvature. Am I missing something here?
Flying north is just a straight line on a globe from Europe to US. But the person was writing about flying even more north than it is optimal fuel-wise
And a lot more income from being essentially an investment bank/hedge fund that has tax incentives for flying airplanes on the side.
It's artificially high because, as the graphic says, this is a cherry-picked breakdown of the "most profitable 10 hour flight" and it ignores all overhead costs.
Someone showed recently showing that on paper, the value of airlines’ air travel business is actually negative - the value of the company is entirely in the loyalty/rewards program and the credit card debt held by its members. They’re basically financial companies that fly airplanes as a side business.
Edit: here it is: https://marker.medium.com/why-the-survival-of-the-airlines-depends-on-frequent-flyer-programs-2509bd3f25d0
On top of that, over the long run, airlines make... no income.
Here's American Airlines' net income over the past 15 years. It adds up to roughly zero.
In no universe would I ever invest in an airline. It's the worst possible industry. There's not a dollar to be made, only pain.
Yeah, the "most profitable flight" at the top is pulling a lot of weight here. This is the exception, not the norm.
That's assuming a full flight inc first and business classes.
This is what I was thinking as well. This makes the unit economics actually profitable even before even accounting wizardy enters the conversation
Half the revenue comes from first and business class, and that's a minority of the seats. Even on a domestic flight, a flight attendant once told me that the first class seats pay a disproportionately high share of the revenue for the flight.
Surprisingly, first class is about as profitable as economy, on a per square foot basis. It’s business class that really drives the profitability… and cargo.
Do a lot of airlines still have the First/Business/Domestic breakdown anymore, though?
I travel fairly frequently and rarely see that setup anymore, and it's mostly Asian carriers that mostly fly incredibly long routes. Certainly in domestic travel, I never ever see that breakdown anymore. It's usually Business/Econ Plus/Econ.
And the fare proportions (again, in my experience) are very different from those in the infographic (EDIT- misread graph). I'm very curious how they arrived at these numbers.
(who can get a $150 ticket to a 10-hour flight???)
Read closer—150 pax at $800 / head
It's a difference of domestic vs. international long-haul. Domestic flights will typically be served by single-aisle aircraft such as the Boeing 737 or Airbus A320. These flights will usually only have two cabins: Business/First and Economy (with Economy sometimes further segregated into "economy plus" or "saver" sections). The business/first seats on these planes are usually not much better than premium economy on international long-haul flights.
International long-haul flights are typically serviced with larger dual-aisle planes like the 777, 787, A330, and A350. On these planes, it's common for business class to feature fully lie-flat seats for sleeping which are way, way more comfortable than domestic "first" class. On these long-haul flights you'll usually see a 3 or 4 class cabin layout: Economy, Premium Economy, Business, and sometimes First class.
First class is rarely $5,000 for a 10 hr flight any longer. It's more like $8,000-$10,000 for a lot of these flights now
Lots of airlines have ditched first class, so the data is probably really old and from when first class was available for $5,000.
Indeed first/business drives a lot of revenue. Adding to the replies below yours, there's the additional benefit of one sale for the seat vs having multiple economy seats in the same space. This lowers weight (pax + luggage) which adds a reasonable fuel burn (A 777-200LR has a ludicrous fuel burn per passenger when near max range). Then there's the additional cost of sales (marketing seat, pax handling through company CSRs and airport facilities).
In this case economy is equal to first class and business class combined. And this is a 10 hour flight where its easier to upsell the Fancy stuff. Most domestic flights heavily struggle to sell those and barely have any. So for domestic flights they have to treat it like the Greyhound in the sky. No 1% is paying for a fancier Spirit airlines flight.
Cost wise they are about equal, but proportionally the upper class tickets give more revenue for less space on the aircraft. Airlines would make way more money if the whole plane was business class but as you said it would be a struggle to sell those tickets
Obviously. But again I think that you're talking about international flights. The more common form of American flight is domestic (can't really speak for other countries). And its much harder to sell luxury for a two hour flight that he can sleep through. And of course, the very rich would thumb their nose at flying commercial anyway.
Premium economy is apparently the biggest profit % class for most airlines.
Realistically in most cases you're simply paying double the price for 30% more space.
"Other revenue" looks incorrect based on my knowledge. Should be higher. Airlines make decent money hauling cargo.
Depends on the aircraft. A 777, yes. A 787, no.
Any aircraft yes, passenger aircraft have more cargo in it than baggage more often than not
The amount of weight and cargo hold volume dedicated to cargo is much lower on long haul flights than short-haul flights for obvious reasons: passengers on long haul flights will have larger and heavier bags on average, and the fuel load has to be much closer to maximum, so the amount of free weight / volume that could be allocated to air cargo is significantly smaller. Plus there are other (relatively unimportant) increases in weight associated with things like additional meals. Since this infographic is about a 10 hour flight, the lack of substantial revenue from cargo transport isn't that surprising.
It's very surprising actually, you'd be surprised how small pax bags can be packed into containers, and most of the cargo hold is still empty afterwards. International flights make a HUGE amount of their profit from contract cargo carrying.
United, which has the biggest cargo business of the US flagged passenger carriers, had $391 million in cargo revenue for their most recent quarter and $11,313 million in passenger revenue. They don't break out notional profit by passenger versus cargo because it's really almost impossible to assign profit that way for airplanes, but their total revenue per seat-mile is only about 10% more than their passenger revenue per seat-mile. It's pretty difficult to argue that they make a huge amount of their profit from cargo when cargo makes up only a small fraction of their business.
https://ir.united.com/static-files/9de36b41-9ffd-4b60-9154-5e895300396c
United isn't exactly a great example (really none of the big 4 US carriers are) as only ~25% of their fleet is widebody, long haul aircraft. That said if you broke out to cargo revenue from the long haul and short haul routes that would be interesting. Also, it'd be better to cite Qatar or Cathay for raw numbers as their long haul fleet, or specifically Emirates with a 100% wide body fleet.
Actually now that I'm looking, Emirates 2022/3 net revenue of $32.6B and their Cargo revenue of $4.7B at 14% of their total revenue is a pretty good example (compared to the 3% of Uniteds reported numbers). Now Emirates has a cargo fleet of 14 along with their strong passenger fleet of 249 so the numbers go deeper than press releases can show as it's not broken into cargo on cargo flights vs cargo on pax flights.
It is not corroborated by anything more than something I heard, but I thought a lot of airlines profit from their credit cards and 'miles' systems. Does the revenue from financing this way get counted in this chart as revenue from the customer?
So, roughly we can say that cost of each passenger for the flight is 1166$ with full plane. This gives an idea how Ryanair has to squeeze their costs and why I need to squeeze my legs lol
People online really complain about a 60€ ticket that make it possible for them to go across Europe in 4 hours inside a fliying metal miracle of human engineering because their leg space is not enough and the landing is a little rough (Ryanair is one of the safest airline in the world)
Train from Eindhoven to Groningen in the Netherlands (3,5h) is about the same.
Ryanair, as terrible as they are. They do have a very smart business model.
They fly mainly from smaller not so popular airports, paying close to zero often negative landing fees. Read: Ryanair gets paid for landing their planes. As they attract more business and create jobs.
Ryanair buys annually huge amounts of new 737s, getting the highest discounts in the business. Fly with them fewer years than the industry average, sell them to other airlines with minimal to even negative depreciation. Read: Ryanair makes money on selling their used planes.
Boeing's current problems and low output affect Ryanair's business model a lot.
16% ROI seems pretty good. I doubt it's that high
That’s because this excludes overhead. Net margins for airlines are in the low single digits.
It says in the title of the graphic that it's the most optimistic scenario, and in the footnote it explains that it excludes all overhead costs.
It isn't that high in practice.
What about airline credit cards? My understanding was the rewards programs printed money like crazy.
Yeah I suspect this data is misleading because of the omission of credit card / rewards program revenue.
My best guess is that it's more difficult to evaluate on a per-flight basis
In fact, I think they lose money w/o the credit card agreements.
Came here looking for this. Delta makes somewhere in the neighborhood of $7b from Amex. At that point, you could argue that Delta is a bank that also operates an airline.
Maintenance and upkeep, inspections, airframe replacement, marketing,
That's the "other labor". Airframe replacement is a capital investment, not included in revenues and expenses.
And this is why we don't have self flying planes. The cost of the pilot is basically nothing compared to the PR risk if a computer EVER messes up, plus there is a risk you might lose some paranoid customers as well. At least in passenger planes.
I am curious what 'additional labor' is ....
Maybe the additional labor fees are considering ground crew, baggage claim personnel, maintenance staff, baggage loaders, Im sure airlines probably have to pay towards security staff and stuff like that
Yeah I'm just curious about the breakdown and what they've included. Its such a large lump with no explanation.
Yeah I agree, its a big amount of money without details. Maybe it’s just there are 1000s of people to consider in that category that its hard to break down ? I would love to see more detail if its out there
The plane depreciates $40k every flight???
This website puts the leasing cost for a new 787-9 (which should be roughly the right size to match OP's chart) in the ballpark of a million dollars a month. If you assume the plane makes 25 flights a month, that puts you right at $40k a flight.
I don't know how accurate the figures on that particular site are to the reality of the industry, but airliners are very expensive.
That likely covers much more than just the plane. Other assets need to be included, such as flight taxi and baggage equipment, possibly a share of the airports themselves, and so on.
Intercontinental planes cost $100-200 million each, I think the depreciation per flight is in the right ballpark yeah.
Now I want to see how the catering budget has changed in the last 5 to 10 years to save money.
Airlines? Airports? Flights? 'Airplanes' is a confusing term, here.
I just have a question about this infographic format : Why do insurance, depreciation, and misc costs come out of gross profits instead of total revenue?
Generally speaking the costs the come out of revenue are those associated with just the single flight. If this flight doesn’t happen, the plane is still depreciating (even if sitting idle for years), insurance is still paid, misc costs etc. ie these costs for the full year will be the same regardless of whether this specific flight occurs. Some assumptions can be made by management on what to put before/after gross profit but this is a high level explanation.
This may be how planes make money, but it is not how airlines make money. At this point, they are basically credit card companies that incidentally also offer air travel.
The big thing that this is missing is that airlines make a boatload of money - indeed MORE MONEY than from planes - by selling airline miles (which they make up from thin air) to banks.
Flying planes is more or less an accessory business that they need to do in order to sustain their main business
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/airlines-banks-mileage-programs/675374/
this is why they wanted to make standing economy class so they can fit more people
And this is with the fuel costs heavily subsidized.
You are missing another source of revenue. Airlines typically take the customer’s money weeks or even months ahead of travel. They invest it to make more money. They also sell mailing lists to marketing firms to sell customers on destination hotels and activities. “So you’re going to Barcelona, and you like wine and bicycling”.
Fascinating. Thanks for doing this.
wow 72K of fuel, I thought it would be less
One thing to keep in mind is the graphic says it's a 10 hour flight, which means that this data is probably for a much larger plane. This isn't a 737 going from Chicago to NY. It's more likely a 747 or A380.
A flight using B747 or A380 with 180 total passengers on board is not gonna turn a profit.
True. I don't know what plane would fit with what is shown here when taken all together. Fuel costs are incredibly variable so it's tough to say what they would use as the price per gallon for this.
Regardless, I don't know of a passenger plane that's only seating 180 people and flies that kind of range.
Regardless, I don't know of a passenger plane that's only seating 180 people and flies that kind of range.
787-8 with three-class config. Such as ANA.
Depending on configuration a 737 can hold up to about 200 pax. 180 people from the graph is right between an airbus a320 and a321.
No 737 has a 10 hour range with 180 people on board. This is a 757 or 787.
Yep. I didn’t notice that until after I made the comment. The a321 neo probably still could, but definitely not a 737.
Nah jet A is ~$7/gal or whatever the contact is worked out to be and a 777 will take 50T for a 7 hour flight.
50000kg * 2.2 = 110,000 pounds 110,000 / 6.7 = ~16,500 gallons 16,500 * $7 = ~$115,000
I’d like to see the revenue types for low-costs
if you own a plane, it depriciates 37k from one flight?
Such a plane costs 100 million. So that’s about 3,000 flights before the depreciation alone covers the cost of the plane.
You left out the $50K for replacement doors if it's a Boeing plane.
You forgot credit card programs which accounted for nearly all of Deltas profit last year.
For the USA the pilot cost would be much higher. For a 10 hour flight you would have 1 senior captain who makes around $550/hour including retirement contribution, and 2 first officers who make at least $350/hour including retirement contribution each, for a total $12,500.
Airplanes dont make money though. Airlines are heavily subsidized
Yeah, where are the subsidies and the once a decade bailout they always seem to require.
This graph really simplifies how seats are sold. Many of those business and first class seats will be obtained through upgrades or using FF miles, so some people won't be paying the "sticker price" for the seats.
This also goes for passengers who are also making connections as part of their itinerary. Different origin/destination routes can have widely different prices. Someone going from A to B will pay a different price than someone going from A to C, or someone going from D to E. They are all on the same flight at some point in their journey, but originating from and heading to completely different destinations paying very different prices.
Long haul flights are the most profitable flights because of many reasons that would take forever to get into.
Short haul flights are typically much less profitable, if they even are.
This graphic also doesn't take into account delays, cancelations, or customer concessions for both of the previous in the form of compensation/vouchers.
This is how airlines made money.
The airplanes don't really make money.
There are other charges like baggage fees, seat assignment fees, etc. that might be accumulated with these costs, but they accrue primarily to coach classes given the larger number of these folks.
Most of the profit comes from loyalty programs, that is not covered in this chart.
This is a disgusting way to present this data. People have hard-ons for this type of data visualization lately, but this is almost certainly not a beautiful way to present this data whatsoever.
What type of infographic is this? I want to use it for work
And the revenue generated from airline credit cards dwarfs all this
As a finance guy, I really dislike these charts. I know it’s intended as a data visualization, but Sankey diagrams are grossly inferior to tables for displaying financial data.
Can you include Airlines? Pretty sure airlines make most of their money now from selling "points" to banks
What kind of plot/graph is this? In other words: What is this type of graph called?
Why 5k to give out shitty crackers and water?
Where does the government grants and buyouts and funding factor in? I know they get it
That’s odd I don’t see taxpayer bailout listed.
The fact that there’s no maintenance costs has got me worried but feels accurate for the current Boeing situation.
Now do budget airlines, with no 1st or business class passengers and economy pay <$100.
What is this type of chart / data visualization called? It's so beautiful
No maintenance cost! Nice plane you guys have here I’d love to see your logbooks
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/air-transport/airline-operating-costs/
Tools: Power Bi & Canva
The dollar sign goes before the number.
Man, $4250 for pilot + copilot for a single flight? How many flights does a pilot fly per month?
Quick math: Pilots average about 75 flight hours per month (they're not allowed to have over 100 flight hours per month) (source). Let's say the pilot:copilot cost ratio is 2:1 based on this salary source.
Based on the $4250 number:
- Pilot per 10 hours = $2,833 per flight, $283/hr
- Copilot per 10 hours = $1,417 per flight, $141/hr
That totals to about $21,250/month for a pilot and $10,625/month for a copilot, so $255k and $128k per year, which is well within the salary ranges linked above. The copilot salary might be a little high compared to the salaries linked, but those salaries are for first-year copilots.
Just to provide some more accurate numbers for your well written reply...
Last time I looked at the contract for United Airline's pilots a year 1 pilot makes $200 hr and a year 10 captain makes $450 hr.
The $4250 number is incorrect, would be closer to $10,000 for this flight. Flights this long require 3 pilots. Captain, first officer, & relief pilot.
I feel like this is missing the massive amount that airlines get from banks they partner with, pushing their cards.
Edit: or is that amortized for a single plane at $10k?
How do airports make money ?
Landing fees. Fuel sales. Ramp/Hangar leases. Aircraft services. Business leases/fees. Parking.
The overpriced bottle of water once you're through customs.
By selling you perfume and booze.
Most profitable flight has 15.9% profit margin?
What’s the least profitable flight look like? What do they look like. Anyone know?
Those seat numbers are pretty low. Take a Swiss A330: 8 F, 43 J, 21 PY, 159 Y.
If that’s the most profitable flight, no wonder the airlines have trouble making a go of it.
Where is maintenance cost?
Thank god for first class
Damn I didn’t know their margins were that close lol
I feel like Airline business is one business I would never want to run. Its astonishing it makes any profit at all. Like every single factor possible goes against it.
Is net profit the rightmost one, not gross profit
Seems wild that business and first are 50% of revenue and 1/5th as many people as economy.
Wouldn’t it make sense to just concert the whole plane to business class and lower price? Or shit, just add some business class and shorten the plane up?
Never thought of using canva with Tableau/PowerBI, looks great!
is cargo not included in this? most airlines get about 10% of their revenue from cargo on their flights.
Put a 787/777/A330/A350 up there because 737s don’t fly these routes or these quantities of passengers 😛
Air transport as an industry is on the low end of U.S. industries in terms of net profit margin, boasting 2.79%, when the total market average is 7.59%.
I think you need a special license or a license for each person viewing for Power BI. So this is infringement (and the license is pathetic if the goal is information sharing).
I saw something a while back saying that airlines make most of their money selling their points to businesses that partner with them, and have basically created an unregulated currency system
5.2k for cabin crew? There are at least 4 of them. Not sure about US but here cost for employees are a lot bigger than what that employee gets deposited on his bank account.
Granted I only fly from Bay Area to Europe on ten hour flights but none of them have had 180 passengers and are all well above that.
I thought they made all their money from mileage programs.
what tool is this sankey made with
Where is the cost of maintenance?
My first thought was: Who had time to make this?
Hi, what is a chart like this called? Thanks!
just look. it's mentioned right on the chart.
This reminds me of medicine. Insurance companies, the government, health care administration, etc. fight pretty hard to make physician saleries seem to be the problem. In reality, it's only about 8% of total healthcare costs.
Labor costs are too high. I would either replace humans with AI or exploit foreign workers.
/s
…or is it?
This image is missing the entire airline points industry lmao
This is wrong. Airlines make almost all of their money from credit cards. They are essentially a bank!
Maintenance?
Never heard of him!
“Boeing” probably
Why can’t we have bullet trains again?
Additional Labor Costs seems too large to simply terminate there, would like to know what those additional labor costs are.