Random Thoughts

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Cat
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Random Thoughts

Post by Cat » Tue Sep 27, 2022 9:05 pm

1) Parking discounts for hubs should only be given if the hub in question has a physical presence: office, warehouse or service center.
Currently there is no incentive to build anything at an airline's hub.

2) Package Cargo: Should scheduled routes be required to access packages? We are also guilty of "cherry picking" with Charter Flights, having no established routes to places we are getting relatively good package loads in/out of.

3) Option to scheduled routes: Pay Charter Flights only 75% of full package cargo pay. This would provide an incentive to establish routes.

4) Flight Route Limits: Define a finite number of flights ANY airline can establish. This would prevent auto generation of thousands of unused flight routes by those who are really good with spreadsheets.

5) Require an airline to service the routes they declare .... wow this would be interesting! LOL Much like an aircraft type certificate- have to fly a route at least once every 90 days or it auto deletes from the system. Maybe raise that up to 6 months for routes. In the real world, if you don't use your landing slots at a major airport within a certain time, that slot goes up for bid.

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This ought to stir the conversation pot a little..... it's been fairly quiet lately ha ha ha ha

Happy Flying!

EDITED:
Actually if just number 5 was implemented, a lot of issues would take care of themselves regarding excessive unused flight routes.
The exception would be training flight routes that would have an unlimited life span.
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Cat
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Re: Random Thoughts

Post by Cat » Tue Sep 27, 2022 10:04 pm

MORE RANDOM THOUGHTS:

Charter Flights unable to access packages at all. Generic cargo only.

Airport Physical Presence: Office only - 50% off parking at that location Any Warehouse: 60% off parking Small/Med Service Center: 70% off parking
Large Service Center: 80% off parking Extra Large Service Center: 90% off parking.
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joefremont
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Re: Random Thoughts

Post by joefremont » Wed Sep 28, 2022 9:27 pm

Lots of interesting idea's.

For parking, we could certainly adjust that. Right now you get a 50% discount for the fleet if they are in there fleet hub plus 10% if you have any buildings (office, maintenance or warehouse), we could certainly adjust that.

As for scheduled vs charter routes let me just explain how the current system for generating packages works.

About 1/3 of all packages are distributed by random, based on the population in the area of the starting airport and the distance and population of the destination airport, for each package size the destination airport has to be within a give range specified for each package type..

For the remaining 2/3 of packages its based on the amount of cargo carried between airports on FSA in the last 90 days. To that is added an amount for each route defined, each route acts as if a flight had gone with about 600 kg of cargo.

The system will first calculate how many packages each airport gets, and then based on the departing flights/routes where those packages are going.

We could just ignore the routes, but the reason I had that in the first place is basically to prime the pump, pilots won't fly a route unless there is cargo to carry, but the system won't put in as many packages if there are no flights. I think I may make an adjustment so it does not matter how many routes exist between two airports, but am reluctant to remove it entirely as it does allow the system to start adding packages for that destination before the airline starts flying it. Otherwise the airline will have to fly some money loosing flights to get the pump going and that might discourage the first time pilots. We could say only count recently created routes but that would encourage airlines to delete and recreate there routes often, neither sound appealing to me.

One side effect of the way packages are generated I have found is for the smaller airports, where there are usually a few flights going to a major hubs, there are a lot more packages going to the hub that the other way around, as at the major hub there is usually a lot more flights to other destinations which divides the outgoing traffic. So as an experiment I am going to make a change to the package generator so that when generating the packages for an airport, on every other package I am going to reverse the direction, so it will be an incoming package rather than an outgoing, this should get the balance of packages to and from an airport more equal.
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joefremont
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Re: Random Thoughts

Post by joefremont » Wed Sep 28, 2022 9:48 pm

For charter flights, the idea behind it was so that pilots could create there own flights rather than giving them access to edit the VA's main route list. That the route only exists for a short time means it's not a major factor in the generation of packages, but of course that has no effect heavily travelled routes. About 25% of all flights right now are charter flights and of those about 2/3 carry packages. I don't think restricting those would make me very popular.

As to limits on routes, There is a limit on how many routes an airline can create through the import tool, which is about 20,000 routes per VA, only 10 VA's have more than that, for the larger active airlines I have allowed more when a VA asks for it, and even if you have reached the import limit you can always add more one at a time manually. Some VA's (mine included) have recreated the routes of historic airlines and I will probably never be able to fly all of them. We have over a million routes in the database and it takes up a lot of space, but I know there are those who have fun researching all those routes and I don't want to limit that too much. We could say that when generating packages ignore the routes for VA's that have more than 5000 routes, we can see how that works.
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Cat
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Re: Random Thoughts

Post by Cat » Thu Sep 29, 2022 1:44 am

Thanks for the response Joe, as I said in my topic post, these are just Random Thoughts.

Another one I had was how to protect airlines who establish routes to build packages only to lose them to charter flight "cherry pickers".

The Charter Flight system is a really good tool, I myself use it more than 90% of the time as it's just faster than making a new route to where I want to go. We deleted thousands of flight routes awhile back as the system was getting pretty slow when looking for a route to fly.

But for me, it doesn't seem quite fair to the guys/gals who put in the work to create a flight route system to hopefully build up their package count only to have outsider charter flight pilots swoop in with a big bird and take them all. This may be a problem without a solution, too.
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Re: Random Thoughts

Post by Cat » Sat Oct 08, 2022 4:35 pm

AND YET MORE RANDOM THOUGHTS: :shock:

New "Airport Center" to build: Company HQ & Pilot Training Center. $1 million to build and $25,000 a month to maintain. Part of the "cost of doing business" for larger airlines. ha ha ha How many VA's would build one? I'm guessing other than us, ZERO Prolly not worth the effort on Joe's part.

Would not have to be crazy like this: https://www.yahoo.com/news/american-ope ... 00023.html
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Re: Random Thoughts

Post by joefremont » Sat Oct 08, 2022 5:27 pm

Cat wrote:
Sat Oct 08, 2022 4:35 pm
AND YET MORE RANDOM THOUGHTS: :shock:

New "Airport Center" to build: Company HQ & Pilot Training Center. $1 million to build and $25,000 a month to maintain. Part of the "cost of doing business" for larger airlines. ha ha ha How many VA's would build one? I'm guessing other than us, ZERO Prolly not worth the effort on Joe's part.

Would not have to be crazy like this: https://www.yahoo.com/news/american-ope ... 00023.html
It might make sense if I ever get around to doing automated pilots, but before then what would be the benefit to VA's?
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Random Thoughts

Post by Cat » Sat Oct 08, 2022 6:38 pm

wouldn't be any ... just another way for VA to spend some of their billions LOL

OR give em free parking and they can only have ONE HQ/Pilot Training Center. For larger VA's with lots of jets at their HQ hub, that would be an incentive.
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