The Pulse Report 
Informing Airport Finance Professionals
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"The monthly [landing fee] reports . . . give us more overall performance statistics than we were getting before on our own, and with much less effort from our staff. We trust the data and the process."
Delta Air Lines Boston Logan |
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| November 2009 |
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Welcome to the November 2009 edition of The PASSUR® Pulse™ Report, an eNewsletter created exclusively for the Airport Finance community.
This month we're looking at how using PASSUR Pulse can  benefit your airline partners through the application of more precise landed weights by aircraft variant. In one example, we identified an annual shortfall of more than $100,000 at one airport due to inaccurate landed weight capture -- money that would have been made up by all the other carriers in the typical residual airfield accounting system -- or lost to the airport completely in a compensatory airfield. And that's just one carrier, one aircraft type.
We also touch on improved revenue forecasting techniques using PASSUR Pulse, an especially important topic as we head into a new year. Thanks for reading. As always, if you have ideas or questions, please send them over to me, Ron Dunsky, at rondunsky@passur.com. |
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How More Precise Landing Weights Help Your Airline Partners
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We've written often about how PASSUR Pulse can help your airport to more precisely measure landing weights for each individual aircraft that touches down. This makes for more accurate billing, but how does it benefit your airline partners? It actually helps them significantly by ensuring a more accurate, fair distribution of the landing fee based on actual usage.
Some airlines operate with a variety of different maximum gross landed weight within the same aircraft models and variants. For example, as an airline orders new planes, it may, based on a fleet's planned mission, create a sub fleet with a different maximum landing weight than other aircraft of the same variant within the fleet. Historically, because this is difficult to track, a general weight for an entire fleet was often used to calculate landing fees, regardless of configuration or mission.
For some airlines, this may mean they're paying more than their fair share. For others, they may be paying less. With PASSUR Pulse, airlines will be charged the correct amount they owe based upon the actual ship that flies into your airport. Something that's fair like that is a very welcome development.
For example, in the course of one of the landing fee audits PASSUR conducted for one airport, there were 198 flights for one carrier over one month which PASSUR identified at a higher weight than reported by the airline. The difference was not in the counts -- PASSUR reports and the carrier reports matched perfectly -- or in the aircraft type and variant (those matched perfectly too). It was in the weight assigned to the variant. That difference in weight for those 198 aircraft meant an incremental $8,795 for that month for the airport -- and an annualized incremental revenue capture of $105,536. That's a significant amount of money other carriers would have made up that year on a residual-system airfield -- and it's only one carrier's shortfall, for one aircraft type. You can see how accounting for the weight differential can quickly add up to real money.
Airlines will benefit from the more precise tracking of maximum landed weight particularly when:
- They order a new plane with a different configuration from their standard
- They acquire a plane from another carrier and/or change the plane's mission requiring the weights to be recertified -- for example many airlines have moved Boeing 767s from a domestic mission to an international one
- They change an aircraft from a passenger plane to a freighter
To learn more about using PASSUR Pulse to calculate landing weights, contact Evan Danto at evan.j.danto@passur.com. |
Better Revenue Forecasting with PASSUR Pulse
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You likely are very familiar with how PASSUR Pulse can help airports with monthly billing accuracy, but did you know that Pulse can also be very helpful in forecasting future revenues?
 When you begin using PASSUR Pulse, you can easily measure the difference between billed revenue and actual revenue. And activity can be broken down by operation, landed weight, revenue by carrier, and by day. These details often form a pattern that you can quickly apply to your forecast in the near term.
For example, a disruption from a snowstorm that results in cancelled flights and diversions will have an immediate impact on your landing fees. Pulse can tell you by exactly how much within a day of the storm so you can integrate the variance going forward.
After only a couple of months, forecasting future revenues based on variances seen in previous months becomes possible for a number scenarios including schedule changes, fleet adjustments, and the addition and removal of routes. Combined with historical data, you have a powerful forecasting tool to help you budget more accurately for your airport.
If you would like to learn more about revenue forecasting with PASSUR, please contact Evan Danto at evan.j.danto@passur.com. |
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