My previous outfit was an LCC and we did a lot of ops every day, sometimes on short-ish runways and most of the airports were not very busy - we normally had a lot of discretion from the ATC as to which runway/intersection to chose.
The weights were seldom (if ever) performance-limited, so most of the time performance calculations were a trade off between taxi time and Flex.
The company policy was to encourage accepting intersections and use lowest flap setting that allowed to keep the FLEX above certain temperature (60 IIRC). The reason cited was that first degrees of flex/ATM were much more important then deeper reductions i.e. increasing FLEX from 50 to 60 had higher impact on engine wear, than subsequent increase from 60 to 70...
I have always enjoyed juggling with the performance calculations to get the optimum results for myself and the company.
My current employer OTOH - we are only allowed to use one flap setting out of 3 available and intersection takeoffs are generally frowned upon.
Then again it's wide body/long haul ops, so runway length is much more often an issue and performance margins are usually lower. Also, each aircraft does 1-2 ops per day, not 8 - so maybe the financial impact is not significant...
Last edited by C_Star; 23rd Apr 2016 at 04:12.