About recurring flights, it could be great to have recurring flight without fixed number of flight and limit date
and to plan recurring flights weekly (like in thea real life, no ?).
You could be able for example to plan three flight per week to “this destination” : monday, wednesday and saturday. This kind of flights will renew automatically every week, except if you break the contract or you don’t fulfill it.
It would be difficult to get contracts for these flights. Maybe, it’s only after several contracts with an airline company that this company get enough trust in you to offer a contract for “infinite and weekly recurring” flight.
The management of the airport would be more pleasant.
Im not super familiar how it works in the real world. But airports and arilines operates with slot or slot time. (maybe its a better term to use in the game instead of recurring flights).
I would think the slot time is negotiated on a yearly basis and especially charter traffic that is often planned 1 year in advance. Regular slots would I guess is negotiated for several years with option (to give airlines long term horizon to plan according to). As fare as I know, slots are not something that is sold or bought, but assigned. But there is some loopholes where airlines trade slots :).
Maybe instead of signing contracts, we as airport ceo put slots out for “sale” and we get contracts matching the slots. Then we can say I have 2 medium gates slots for 4 weeks and and 4 daily schedules. And we choose the best contract according to bonus if we can handle all the slots on time (within a margin).
In this way, we can plan that in 4 weeks, I have an expansion plan where I need to remove the 2 gates to make room for a new terminal building.
Good idea! I also would like to have contracts where I have the options for a prefered destination. I get contracts with many flights to Syria, Iran and Turkey! But I haven’t had any to for example Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, nor to South America.
There should be like a market overview where you can see which flights destination are highly sold and then based on this you can try to get contracts. Would be an additional game play.
I think we ar up to something about the game-play. In the beginning, its a small an not very attractive airport, hence,no long haul flight operator want a slot at our airport. You have to build up a network to get the really big (and profitable routes). In this way you might only get flight to your small stands until you have established good routes to nearby airports. Then the bigger airlines want to have slot time. … and so forth. Now, its just to build like a maniac, because arlines are litterally queing up to fly to and from your airport
Also, when you start to get long haul flights, you will also get feeder routes and transfer (and need to adapt your airport to this).
That’s true. About slots flights, actually I don’t know how it works in real life, but my wish is to be able to manage the flight planning in long term. If in the real life, flights are scheduled one year in advance, it could be one month in the game ?
I totally agree about growing your network flight step by step. The destination of each flight should matter in your strategy of flight planning, to be able to give an equilibrated destinations offer to passengers. The idea of growing your flight network and your cities destinations during the game is very exciting.
It could eventually match with an achievement system : regional airport - national airport - continental airport - international airport
In real life it goes as follows: there are slotted airports and unslotted airports. Small airport usually don’t use slots just because they never need them. Busy airports use slots to regulate traffic and helps to decrease waiting in the air and on the ground. The airport has little influence on the slots. All airlines can request slots at an airport by sending a message to their slot coordinator.
For slots there are a few basic rules:
Slots are free.
No discrimination on airline, aircraft type, sort of flight (cargo, charter, etc.) but you can have historical rights.
Historical rights apply when an airline has used that slot the previous year and operated this slot for at least 80% of the time during the scheduling period.
Airports only coordinate the slots and determine the amount of slots based on their terminal and runway capacity(they can’t just make this up).
But I haven’t had any to for example Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, nor to South America.