26th Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences
including the 8th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference
14 - 19 September 2008, Anchorage, Alaska, USA
Paper ICAS 2008-8.6.4 (AIAA 2008-8977 )

BASE OF OPERATIONS CONCEPT FOR ON-DEMAND OPERATIONS

M. Mane, W. A. Crossley
Purdue Univ., USA

Keywords: on-demand, air transportation, operations

The notion of an on-demand air transportation service, like an air taxi, is of much current interest. For an air taxi service to succeed, it must set the ticket price high enough to cover operating expenses and low enough to attract a significant number of passengers. Keeping operation costs low will be a crucial contributor to the potential success of an air taxi service. Addressing unscheduled events that require aircraft maintenance can be expensive and can require the operator to own additional aircraft to ensure aircraft availability to meet demand. This paper presents the first phase of an approach that considers a “base of operations” strategy. This strategy seeks to reduce operating cost by positioning aircraft at the end of the day to a base of operations in an effort to improve aircraft availability. This first phase of the investigation presents the potential benefits of such a strategy. Relationships between aircraft operational availability and fleet size are developed, an assignment model that estimates the expected positioning costs is formulated, and the expected benefits of improving operational availability are estimated.

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