This may just be something I do that would lead to a pointless addition to the game, but on the off-chance it isn’t, here you go.
As of right now you have the option to manually or automatically have flights assigned to stands. Once you get to a certain number of stands it becomes a bit of a pain to do it manually. However, the last time I let the auto-scheduler do its thing it basically had all my stands taking flights at the same time for the most part. So at 05:00 I had 8 planes landing and then 8 planes leaving at 08:00 (these were all small stands). The next group of arrivals were all planned for 08:00 and by the time those planes were trying to land only a couple of the departures had left. So now I had arrivals being delayed by upwards of an hour because of the runway being tied up.
What I typically do is have set times for each stand that I have and I stagger times based off of that. So my medium stands are (right now) staggered by a half hour and arrival time is at the top of the hour or the bottom of the hour. My small stands are staggered by 15 minutes starting at 06:10. So there are times when there are planes scheduled to arrive or depart at the same time, but it is only a couple, not every plane at the airport.
So, what I’m proposing is the ability to set times on the scheduler that the auto-scheduler would then fill. It could be something similar to what we do now except it is a placeholder that then the auto-scheduler would fill. So you could drop a “small stand time block” of 3 hours on one stand at 06:00 and one at 06:45 on another and the auto-scheduler would fill them in with available flights. You could also expand that eventually to specify on slots a certain airline or certain plane type or class (though I think you would need to create a new class for the CRJ’s and the like so that you can set them to certain stands you don’t have a step truck for so you don’t have A320s showing up on remote stands).
Again, may not be something people would want over other features but I think it is a quality of life feature that might help people. Or it just helps me, who knows.
I had 81 at 5:00am… It’s why I have built my runways the wya I have, to compensate for the autoscheduler landing all of my flights at the same time… tends to create problems. I had this problem when I have 50 gates when I built 5 runways… 81 gates on the same 5 runways, landing only, and 4 runways for taking off… I’d like to be able to tell it to offset each flight by 15 minutes instead of just lining them up. Probably a more advanced feature down the road, but it’s a task to manually schedule in huge airports.
Seems like it would be an additional attribute for gates… (windows for planes)… then the autoscheduler would only need to look for empty windows, and not have to process the entire airport, one gate at a time…
setgateschedulefull:true - autoscheduler only needs to search for gates with this attribute being false and fill in the flight with the gate.
I love this. Especially the thought of the ability to specify what type of plane can land there. I hate going from a 15 max Pax plane on a small stand to the potential u may have a 190pax 757 on your first medium stand. Too big of a jump. Especially with the new ability to assign vehicles to stands, it would be incredible to not have to have a stair truck at a stand that is only for planes that don’t need it.
I’d like to see more intellegent functionality in the flight scheduler tied to the ATC tower.
Small Tower - can handle X landings and X take offs per hour on one runway, auto scheduler works but will schedule as it doe snow
Medium tower - can handle Y landings and Y take-off per runway per hour, and can handle 2 (or three) runways. You can allocate gates to airlines and the auto scheduler will only allocated those airlines to those gates.
Large tower - can handle Z landings and Z take-offs per runway per hour and can handle multiple runways, including crossed runways. Allocate gates by airlines and more controls over arrival times, etc. Must have a large control tower to build a large runway.
I think we should have the ability to select certain gates and allow some to be scheduled automatically and others not. This is because if you want to make a change to the baggage system or something you can just shut off the auto scheduler for the gate.
