According to our Statement, we’ve done over 600k in assignments in the last 12 days! Through everyone’s collective efforts and generous giving, all aircraft have been made airworthy and are operational.
Looking for input on what our next target should be. I have a couple ideas:
Purchase more FBOs. These tend to provide the largest profit given that their are aircraft available, and refueling has been VERY lucrative. There are two options here. We have enough building materials in Idaho and Papa New Guinea to build 2 for free, given that we can find an empty lot on a strip. Option 2 is just purchase one out right.
Save up for another plane purchase. I’m up for any target that anyone wants to use.
What you say is indeed correct. You can’t fly ours in PNG unless we flew it over there, but you can rent one locally (provided there are) to do jobs with.
As for MAD, I’m happy to support whatever! Having more bases is always nice, especially if they provide decent passive income from fuel sales. More planes would also be nice to have. I never flew helicopters in X-plane, so if we’re going to buy one, that might be a good cue for me to start flying them as well.
The biggest issue with buying a helo, or a plane for that matter, is you can’t choose where to buy it. I got lucky with the Kodiak being fairly close to 56CL. I’ll look into the helos, maybe a Bell 412 what?
The issue with the FBOs is finding open space. I found an airstrip in Iran we could repurpose…
That sounds like a good choice, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about choppers to give a worthy opinion. There’s one for sale in Idaho, but no options that I can see anywhere near PNG.
as for the FBO’s, I don’t know what parametres makes them valuable. Do we want ours far apart or close together? There’s a couple of options at grass strips in our vicinity, and there’s also an asphalt strip nearby (33nm) that has a free slot (MD97).
Both of our current FBOs are 1-lot airstrips (The empty circle icon). I think we need to try to find a 2-slotter (Blue icon with 1 strip). They provide more assignments and are generally a little larger than the current RC plane field we occupy.
Well of course I would endorse the 412! It’s my favorite workhorse in X-Plane. It can carry lots of stuff and peeps. It’s a complete joy to fly. And it looks perfectly at home in the jungle.
We’ve established ourselves as a profitable Virtual corporation. We now are operating out of 3 different FBOs in 3 different states, and currently own 5 different aircraft. @Sine_Nomine I think had the right idea of expanding the FBO network. It seems to be much cheaper to build a FBO rather buying them outright. The more FBO’s we own, the higher the profit margin becomes.
In an ideal situation, you would fly a company plane out of a company FBO with an Assignment to another company FBO. Every assignment loses a portion of pay by paying the ground crews.
I’m proposing now we start exploring the options of finding empty lots in the areas near (~150nm) our owned FBO’s (SoCal, SoFlorida, and Virginia). My recommendation would be it has to have two empty slots, preferably be a default 3D airport, and relatively close to a currently owned field.
Also if someone wants to do some overseas traveling, we already own 25000kg of building materials (enough for a two lot FBO) in Papa New Guinea. So really we just need to find an open two-slotter and can build one for “free”.
Also the 56CL FBO, Highway Robbery, is not a part of the group but I always transfer all of its profits to MAD. I cant transfer ownership of it to the group and when I built it I didn’t realize that.
I once again appreciate everyone’s participation, we have done a great job collectively.
You make good points as always, well written and on target. One of the key factors contributing to our issues is the pay of the pilots.
YOU GUYS MAKE TOO MUCH
50% of every assignment goes to the pilot and 50% to the company. Sounds fair, but that really means 50% goes to the pilot and about 20% or less goes to the company after they pay for fuel, boarding fees, rental, ground crew, etc. I think we would see a lot more rapid growth if it were 70-30. I always keep my personal account on zero and just donate the pilot money to the company. I’m not saying everyone should do this, and some members have donated a few hundred thousand, but the 50-50 contract just isnt good for growing the company. Sometimes the pilot can make 3-5k, and the company can actually lose money because of high rental or fuel costs.
The last graphic is pretty sobering. Were seeing a 12k profit on 106k of business. So basically at a 50-50 split, the company legitimately sees 10% profit. Unfortunately Eightball is the only one that can change that, so we’ll just have to make do.
Thank you for being an integral part, this has definitely kept me occupied over the last few weeks as well!
Yeah I even saw on some occasions that MAD was only covering costs, running a loss as I was making money on some of my more marginal flights. I don’t mind giving up my profits to MAD as I’m not really interested in owning anything privately.
I believe you can make a private offer to MAD if you wish to transfer ownership to our collective.
Thanks for this tip! I wasn’t even aware of this section. while 9FL6 isn’t yet generating a whole lot of inbound traffic, it was useful to find a profitable route that led closer to home so I could refuel up the Bell at our homebase.
If you don’t mind, I’ll defer the decisions on FBO constructions to the two of you as I still don’t think I fully grasp how they work. I understand that more lots and more gates produce more jobs but that’s about it. If you guys find a site and need a hand in hauling anything I’ll be happy to lend a hand. I’ll be working from our FBO’s as much as I can help to get the monthly sortie rate up and see if that generates more income. I do remember the incredible airport the two of you spotted some time ago and remember that it had 1100 flight ops per month, so I think @Sine_Nomine is on to something.
What is the opinion on our current fleet? Particularly our 172 and 208. They don’t seem to get rented all that much by outsiders, and nobody in MAD seems to be really flying them other than an occasional hop by beach. Do we want to hold on to those?
I tried to sell it to MAD but I didn’t have the option to accept it, I think Eightball is the only one that has that capability.
As for the 172 and 208, I would have sold them a while ago, but I didn’t know the circumstances of how we came to own them. If Eightball had bought them outright, it wouldn’t be fair for me to just get rid of them. I think we’ve outgrown the usefulness of the 172, but a new player may want to test the waters in a default aircraft. The 208 is a great aircraft for FSE, maybe it just needs to be moved to a more popular area? I would fly it, I’m just waiting on a sale for a good module.
If we can find a good spot in PNG, that would be a freebie expansion. I briefly looked around and their didn’t seem to be anything open though. I don’t really mind where the next FBOs are, I like flying different places.
Might have to paint over our flag…