Was really hoping for more realistic commercial planes for the light stands, like the Beech, but seeing as how that is the only one being offered that seems to be a “regular” in the commercial world, I am sad to see it’s odds…
Hope to see stuff like Saab 340, EMB-110, and EMB-120 for a vote like this…
Great Lakes Airlines no longer operates scheduled passenger flights as of last year when they pretty much closed up shop. They still did a few things for the latter half of last year but the other airline they codeshared with (Aerodynamics) shut down in January of this year as well. Small regional flights in the US are pretty much dead except for some specialty tourism services (like the Grand Canyon area or the island hopping services in the Pacific Northwest) or to remote locations like Wright Air Services does in Alaska.
Interesting, cause the wikipedia entry for the Beechcraft 1900D I’m looking at says this:
In July 2018, a total of 114 1900Cs and 192 1900Ds were in airline service: 207 in the Americas, 63 in Africa, 25 in Europe and 11 in the Asia Pacific and Middle East. Airline operators with nine or more aircraft were:[12]
Mine is as well, I just dug a little deeper into the outlier that had 24 aircraft. I did that because it seemed strange to me based on the other research I have been doing on the small aircraft side of things. I have a feeling we are using small aircraft on the basis of how we remember airlines operating. I remember when operators under US Air Express used to have scheduled flights in airplanes such as a Cessna, the 1900D, and the EMB 120. But looking into that most of those had stopped flying in the mid-2000’s. I then looked at all the major airlines in Europe and saw that none of those fly anything that small anymore either. I looked through the airlines that serve airports in the northern parts of Sweden and found AIS Airlines as the only regional provider that flew something that small (the Jetstream 32).
Airlines have trended away from the use of small aircraft as oil prices steadily rose. The Beechcraft 1900’s went out of production as more and more airlines started choosing to fly 50+ seat airplanes. @ls4a535 is right that wikipedia says that the 1900’s are flown by a bunch more airlines. But most of those are now cargo planes. Ameriflight, Alpine Air, Skylink, and Solenta are all cargo companies. SonAir does fly domestic service in Angola but they were created and still mainly support the oil industry there. So their 1900D’s are used, I think, primarily to get people into airports near oil fields. The only two main passenger service fleets are based in Canada. All of Air Georgia’s flights are out of Calgary to 3 nearby smaller locations and Central Mountain mainly flies into remote locations in British Columbia.
All of this isn’t to say I’m against having small aircraft in the game. They can be fun to see and, if used correctly, would add a neat element to the game that other games like this don’t have. But when a plane like this is put in, is flying on 6 different airlines, and the airport you run has more scheduled flights for that type of plane than there are in the rest of the world? That isn’t for me so I skip over using them. But if that is what people want to be able to do I’m not about to say you shouldn’t. I just want to point out that if we are going for realism then this is what the reality is for those sorts of planes. But it is a game, so in the end it should be whatever people will enjoy the most.