Does not change

How Long the Runway Is

The first of three answers that never expire. A runway does not get longer because somebody wants a bigger aircraft, and that makes this the cleanest constraint in the whole business.

What the answer is: The usable length of the runway at each end of the trip, and therefore which aircraft can operate there.
How long it stays true: Indefinitely. Runways are rebuilt and occasionally extended, and on the timescale of a charter request they are fixed.
What happens when it stops being true: It does not. This is why nobody asks the question twice, and why an answer given a year ago is still worth having.

Why it comes first

Because it rules things out before anything else is considered. An aircraft that cannot use the field cannot fly the trip at any price, on any date, with any crew.

Working out what fits is the operator's job, using its own performance figures for its own aircraft on the day. It is not arithmetic a broker should be doing, and this desk does not do it.

An empty runway on flat open prairie seen straight down its center line, dormant tan grass to either side under a wide pale sky — It was this long last year and it will be this long next year. That is the whole reason this answer sits on the shelf that never expires.

Why a short field is a filter rather than a problem

Plenty of useful fields are short. What a short field does is narrow the list of aircraft, and a narrower list means fewer operators to ask and a different price.

That is worth knowing at the start rather than discovering after a quote has been assembled around an aircraft that cannot land.

The part that is not fixed

The length is fixed. What an aircraft can do with that length is not: it moves with temperature, elevation, how much fuel is aboard and how much weight is being carried. A field that works in January can be marginal on a hot afternoon in August with a full load.

That is one reason what is going in the hold and this page are the same conversation from opposite ends, and it is entirely the operator's calculation.

What this desk records

The two fields, as the caller names them, and any note about the ground the caller already knows. The desk does not assess a field, does not advise on whether an aircraft can use one, and does not name aircraft.

Answers that do not change, one of three shelf lives in what a quote rests on