Bombardier Flexjet Significantly Improves Its Fractional Aircraft Ownership Operations

The fractional aircraft market is the fastest growing segment of the business aircraft industry. A fractional aircraft operation is complex--essentially an unscheduled airline in a constantly changing environment. Bombardier Flexjet implemented a comprehensive three-module optimization system to simultaneously maximize its use of aircraft, crews, and facilities. AD OPT Technologies designed the modules, using the GENCOL optimizer developed at GERAD, which employs a column-generation approach to decompose large-scale mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems. Since inception, the project has generated savings in excess of $54 million with projected additional savings of $27 million annually, primarily by lowering crew levels (20 percent), aircraft inventory (40 percent), and supplemental charter aircraft usage (five percent) while increasing aircraft utilization (10 percent). The quality of customer service has remained consistently high, with significant reduction in supply.