ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the importance of market analysis to the fleet planning process. The necessity of taking a long-term view in fleet planning, coupled with the problems of accurately predicting how markets will evolve in highly competitive situations, means that we need to adopt several parallel but complementary approaches. Macro planning involves aggregating data either for the entire network or, if the routes or markets served have different characteristics, a number of smaller sub-networks. The macro fleet plan is divided into two parts, one comprising the demand and the second comprising the supply. The chapter addresses travel motivation. It moves into an analysis of demand spill and examines how to treat variations of demand over time in the fleet plan. A logical start to the fleet evaluation process is to make an assessment of the degree of productivity of the fleet, either for the airline under study, or for the whole market.
