I offer confidential and neutral advice to airlines seeking to optimise an existing fleet or conduct a fleet renewal exercise.
My experience stems from an extended period working in the Marketing Division of Airbus. During this time I developed numerous fleet plans for airlines of all shapes and sizes located in Europe, Africa, Australasia and China. This work often involved providing guidance on network planning and overall strategy as well as developing fleet plans driven by accurate technical, commercial and operational criteria.
Don’t forget that I have written the standard text book on the subject of airline fleet planning!
Areas of competence
Technical advice
- Developing or updating a set of aircraft evaluation ground rules.
- Providing guidance to the definition of Request For Information or Request For Proposal documents.
- Liaison with aircraft manufacturers to ensure ‘fair play’ in the generation of aircraft weights and performance.
- Interpretation of aircraft manufacturer marketing inputs for non-specialists, both within an airline and to external stakeholders.
Commercial advice
- Establishing a framework for market analysis, traffic projections and potential routes to enable the future fleet composition to be estimated with confidence.
- Recommending and developing an appropriate modelling approach for an economic and financial analysis of various fleet solutions.
- Identifying tactics to match aircraft capacity to the market.
Operational advice
- Providing guidance on scheduling and aircraft assignment challenges.
- Assessment of operational commonality benefits, where these may exist.
- Liaison with aircraft manufacturers to channel airline requirements to the appropriate specialists.
Communication advice
A common failure in aircraft evaluations occurs where messages, information and data are not conveyed to the right people in the right manner. It is vital to establish proper communication paths so that all stakeholders are informed at the right time and everyone with a voice in the process is heard. Lines of communication are established not only within the airline but, crucially, with suppliers, airworthiness authorities, partners, the media, government representatives, shareholders and many more.
The business planning project was a big push for Egyptair and Paul’s sessions on the company vision and mission were inspiring. He was focused with a good understanding of the subject.
