For regional cargo and passenger carriers
What does every tail and trip have to earn?
Flight Systems reads the flight, maintenance and financial records you already keep and prices every tail, trip, pound and seat after full cost. Every quote, contract and fleet call starts from the real number.
Sample operator. Fictional fleet, network, and figures.
- N221XQ, ABQ to ROW, departs 06:05, +402 h
- N225XQ, ABQ to FMN, departs 06:10, +295 h
- N256XQ, ABQ to GUP, departs 06:15, 105 h short
- N230XQ, ABQ to HOB, departs 06:20, +76 h
- N262XQ, ABQ to SVC, departs 06:25, 171 h short
- N241XQ, ABQ to SAF, departs 06:30, +159 h
- N278XQ, ABQ to CNM, departs 06:40, 215 h short
Overview
What the operator earns after every cost, and where the next dollar is.
Sample data. A fictional seven aircraft cargo operator.
Sample data. A fictional scheduled passenger route.
$295K earned after full cost on $8.52M of flight revenue.
Four of seven tails clear their fully loaded breakeven; N256XQ, N262XQ and N278XQ do not.
Where the value is
ABQ to ALM and back earns $1,419 against a $1,840 trip floor.
11 of 18 seats sold at a $129 average fare on a 9 seat Pilatus PC-12. The rotation clears its floor at 15 seats.
Where the value is
Economics
What every tail and trip has to earn.
Sample data. A fictional seven aircraft cargo operator.
Sample data. A fictional scheduled passenger route.
Breakeven is the block hours a tail must fly for its contribution to cover its full share of fixed cost. The mark on each bar is that point.
One rotation in a slow week, ABQ to HOB and back.
The leg home flies anyway. Freight added here costs about $0.11 a pound.
$1,710 short of fully loaded, and $145 short of its trip floor.
Trip floor is what flying the rotation adds in cost, including the leg home: fuel, maintenance and engine reserves by the hour, crew duty pay, and landing and handling fees. Fully loaded adds the rotation's share of fixed cost at the fleet rate of $559 a block hour.
What the trip floor is made of
Trip floor
What flying the trip adds in cost, including the leg home: fuel, maintenance and engine reserves by the hour, crew duty pay, and landing and handling fees. The floor for a spot quote.
Fully loaded breakeven
The trip floor plus the trip's share of the aircraft's fixed cost. The hurdle recurring work has to clear on average. A trip below it can still make sense when the aircraft would otherwise sit and the trip clears its floor.
What a pound must earn on the sample lane, by direction, against what it earns today.
The report gives every lane the same two rows. The floor covers the trip floor and the hurdle covers fully loaded cost, holding the return at today's revenue. A return pound never costs less than $0.11, the handling and the fuel for the weight.
A quote of $1,945 for the HOB rotation lands $145 under its $2,090 floor. It is flagged before it goes out.
Dimensional divisor
At divisor 139, freight lighter than 12.4 lb per cubic foot bills by volume. A 48 by 40 by 48 inch pallet weighing 350 pounds bills at 664 pounds, worth $478 at this lane's yield.
At divisor 166, freight lighter than 10.4 lb per cubic foot bills by volume. A 48 by 40 by 48 inch pallet weighing 350 pounds bills at 556 pounds, worth $400 at this lane's yield.
At divisor 264, freight lighter than 6.5 lb per cubic foot bills by volume. A 48 by 40 by 48 inch pallet weighing 350 pounds bills at 350 pounds, worth $252 at this lane's yield.
A Caravan's practical payload over its cabin volume works out to roughly 6.5 pounds per cubic foot, which makes a divisor near 264 cost neutral for this aircraft.
If this aircraft flew under a block hour contract, a renewal would have to clear $1,142 an hour to cover its full cost. It averages $1,180 today.
Return leg floor
Freight added to a leg that flies anyway costs only handling and the fuel for the weight: about $0.11 a pound here, against an outbound yield of $0.72. Price the empty space against that floor.
From revenue to full cost
Contribution is revenue less cost to fly: fuel, maintenance, crew duty pay, landing and handling, and engine reserves. Everything else is fixed cost.
Evidence
79% of cost is recorded at the tail. Nothing is reconciled until the monthly close signs it off.
Cost by category
$8,229K in total| Tail | Block hours | Revenue per hour | Cost to fly per hour | Fixed cost | Fully loaded breakeven | Cushion, hours | Cushion, dollars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N221XQ | 1,250 | $1,252 | $648 | $512K | 848 | 402 | $243K |
| N225XQ | 1,125 | $1,319 | $671 | $538K | 830 | 295 | $191K |
| N230XQ | 1,040 | $1,180 | $655 | $506K | 964 | 76 | $40K |
| N241XQ | 960 | $1,402 | $702 | $561K | 801 | 159 | $111K |
| N256XQ | 875 | $1,214 | $662 | $541K | 980 | (105) | ($58K) |
| N262XQ | 800 | $1,234 | $689 | $529K | 971 | (171) | ($93K) |
| N278XQ | 625 | $1,364 | $716 | $544K | 840 | (215) | ($139K) |
| Fleet | 6,675 | $1,277 | $674 | $3,731K | 6,186 | 489 | $295K |
The fleet line shows revenue and cost to fly per hour as averages weighted by block hours.
The fleet line converts the fleet's $295K cushion to hours at its average contribution of $603 an hour, which gives 489 hours. The tails add up to 441, because an hour is worth a different amount on every tail. That gap is why a fleet average misleads.
Seat floor: $102 when every seat sells, $167 at today's load.
With a $1,950 subsidy per completed round trip, the rotation clears full cost by $537 at today's load, and keeps clearing it down to 7 seats.
Data
Every source the sample is built from. Read only; nothing writes back.
Sample data. A fictional seven aircraft cargo operator.
Sample data. A fictional scheduled passenger route.
Sources
Sources
- Recorded
- From a system of record.
- Allocated
- Shared cost assigned by a driver you can change.
- Modeled
- An estimate that carries its assumption.
- Reconciled
- Recorded cost that ties to your ledger.
- Read only. Nothing writes back.
- Every figure traced to its source.
- Reconciled to your general ledger.
- Mutual NDA before any data moves.
From the numbers to the next decision.
One economic record for the whole certificate, put to work where the calls get made: dispatch, maintenance control, the commercial desk and the owner's office.
1Know
Know what every tail, trip and seat earns.
Tail breakeven, trip floors and price floors by route and direction, per pound and per seat. Every figure is recorded, allocated or modeled and reconciled to your general ledger, then rebuilt after every close.
Available nowBuilt on the ProEdge evidence standardEvery line labeled before it is added up.
2Act
Catch it at 19:40, not at 06:20.
The system of work reads your records for the conditions that cost money: a write up the night before a bank, a quote under its floor, a tail slipping below breakeven. It prices each one, sends the next action to the person who owns the call, and follows up until the loop is closed.
Your people keep every judgment. Schedule risk from your records, never an airworthiness determination.
In development with our first operatorsOpen write up on the tail scheduled for the 06:20 departure to HOB. $1,760 of outbound revenue at stake. DOM to confirm.
Swap to an available tail
Hold the departure
Cancel and rebook
- 19:40Write up recorded
- 20:06Flagged, priced, routed
- 05:00Follow up sent
- 06:20Departure to HOB
Illustrative. Fictional operator and aircraft.
3Prove
Know which decisions paid.
Every decision is logged with what it was meant to move, then read against a baseline locked before the change. Margin gained is measured, not claimed.
In developmentIllustrative. No result is shown until one has been measured and checked.
Results
Every decision priced. Every result measured.
The work is aimed at one thing, a more profitable operation, and every change is read against a baseline you agree to before it starts.
- 1Stop flying below the floor.Quotes, contracts and fares checked against what each trip adds in cost.
- 2Fix, redeploy or sell the tails that lose money.Every tail against its own fully loaded breakeven.
- 3Sell the empty space and the empty seats.Return freight and seats priced against their own floor.
- 4Count what the ledger leaves out.Financing and engine reserves in the cost to fly.
Your books show $6.41M. Flying the fleet at full cost takes $8.23M.
Sample operator. Fictional figures.
The first verified result will appear here, with the operator's permission, when its measurement period closes.
Start with one analysis. Keep it current every close.
Nothing to install and nothing written back. Your flight, maintenance and accounting systems stay the record.
- A short callYour fleet, customers, pricing and systems. We tell you whether the analysis will be useful before you send anything.
- You send exportsRead only exports from the systems you already run. No logins, nothing installed.
- We build and reconcileTail and trip economics built from your records and reconciled to your financial statements.
- We walk it throughA working session with the owner and your finance and operations leads. You keep the report and the method behind every figure.
Then every close, the record is rebuilt, new quotes and renewals are checked against their floors, and last month's decisions are read against this month's numbers.
What we ask for: financial, flight and maintenance records; bookings and fares if you carry passengers; fleet, contract and subsidy terms. Exports only. The detailed list follows the mutual NDA.
Read only. Your systems stay the record.
Flight Systems starts from exports you send. Any later refresh is read only, and you control the access.
- Nothing written backYour flight, maintenance and accounting systems stay exactly as they are.
- Your data stays yoursYour raw operating data is used to deliver your analysis. We don't sell or share identifiable operator data, and any anonymized benchmarking or shared learning requires a separate agreement. Mutual NDA before anything moves.
- Decision support, not controlNo dispatch, no operational control, no airworthiness determinations. Your team makes every call.
Questions
Is this a fit for us?
Built for regional cargo and passenger carriers flying recurring routes under Part 135, typically 4 to 25 aircraft with at least a year of records: contract and scheduled cargo, scheduled commuter service, subsidized routes and regular charter. If you fly one or two aircraft, a well kept spreadsheet may be all you need.
Do you handle passenger service and subsidized routes?
Yes. Passenger rotations get a trip floor and a seat floor at the load you carry. Subsidy paid per completed flight counts as revenue on the flights it pays for, so you see what the subsidy covers and what the fares have to.
Why not build this in a spreadsheet?
You can, once. Keeping it reconciled every month, across three systems, with allocations that hold up in front of a lender, is the part that breaks. That ongoing work is what the monthly record does, and the method behind every number comes with it.
Our records are messy. Does that matter?
That's normal. Every figure is marked recorded, allocated, or modeled, recorded figures are reconciled to your books where they tie, and gaps are shown rather than filled with guesses.
How do you split overhead across tails?
By block hours unless you have a better driver. The method appears on every allocated figure, and you can change it.
What does it cost?
The diagnostic is a fixed fee set by fleet size. We share it on the first call, before any data moves.
Find out what every tail and trip has to earn.
Five questions about your operation, then your details. It takes about two minutes and tells both of us whether the analysis will be useful before you send anything.
Read only. Mutual NDA before any data moves.
- Flying
- Fleet
- Visibility
- Pricing
- Records
- Profile
1 of 5: Flying pattern
How much of your flying repeats week to week?
Contract cargo, scheduled service and regular charter lanes behave differently from one off trips.
2 of 5: Fleet
How many aircraft are on your certificate?
Tail economics start to diverge once a fleet has more than a few aircraft.
3 of 5: Economic visibility
How well do you know what each tail earns today?
Not the fleet total. Each aircraft, after its share of fixed cost.
4 of 5: Pricing basis
How are trips and contracts priced today?
Spot quotes, renewals and backhaul freight each need a different number underneath them.
5 of 5: Record readiness
Which records can you export today?
Your general ledger, flight leg history, and maintenance tracking.
Your operation
Where should we send the follow up?
A member of the ProEdge team will follow up directly. Nothing is shared until an NDA is in place.
How we handle what you send: Privacy Policy
Your fit screen result
Your request has been recorded.
A member of the ProEdge team will follow up directly to confirm which records you have. Nothing is shared until an NDA is in place.