Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

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Buzz313th
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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Buzz313th » Thu Nov 26, 2009 4:05 pm

Alaskan Flyboy wrote:Given I was a former flight student who's flight school had an MEL for their training aircraft, I'm quite familiar with the door-stop/make-shift-weapon-to-beat-a-terrorist-to-death-with. It think it had to have added 20 pounds to our weight and balance in those poor Cherokees. :mrgreen:
LOL, I don't think a Cherokee has an MEL. Wouldn't it just be a squawked item that isn't required for that particular flight?


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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Buzz313th » Thu Nov 26, 2009 4:14 pm

Brian Peace wrote:Just for the record, any actual "ownership" of gates or property (airports) would be a bad, bad idea. That is what FSE is all about, and you cant really fly where YOU want to... and the beauty of FSA is that you can makes routes and fly where your heart desires, and have a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

Now, having to pay "rentals" for gates is not a bad idea, as long as there is no limited amount of gates anywhere. The more you rent the more you pay... fine... but can you imagine NOT having your VA route to EGLL becuase all the gates got snapped up by the first VA to notice them? I cant... and that's what scares me.

I agree... No on ownership...

Correct, for starters I think limiting the number of gates and ramp space, although highly realistic, is not a good way to introduce these two additional rules to the game.
If the devs find it interesting enough to add this idea to the system and it works well, a future plan to simulate the limited space and gates available at airports could be done by increasing lease rates for gates and maint facilities on a sliding scale based on the number of leased gates/maint facilities already taken up. Example... If LAX has "X" number of gates at that airport and VA's of FSA have already taken up that number, then any additional leases are contracted at a higher cost, simulating the fact that there are only so many spaces available. This would represent a higher burden to VA's that want to lease at that said airport if there are no more "available" gates, thus forcing the need to "Codeshare" (Sharing gates) and partner up. This would economically force VA's to "Hub" somewhere else and wait for available space at the airport of thier choice.

All of this would reward VA's that are truly active and organised versus the VA's that are just one man shows or overextended when comparing thier fleet versus the actual number of active pilots.

Keep in mind Brian, that even in the real world, airports will always maintain open transient gates to be used by airlines who either, don't have any leased gates or need airports services to any uncheduled aircraft that lands at that particular airport. These Gates in the real world are called "overflow" or transient gates. LAX has a number of these gates located at the far west end of the center of the field. These gates at LAX are set up to recieve arival passengers, but not load departure passengers. If you have a close look at LAX in google earth, you will see these, "Terminals" in the middle west of the field.

Also keep in mind that you don't have to lease a gate, you can always just pay the transient gate fee at landing and or pay the transient storage fee for every additional 24 hours your aircraft stays there. The idea is that doing this often would cost quite a bit more money to do than to just lease gate space or a maint facility if you have a lot of operations outa that airport.

JB

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Buzz313th » Thu Nov 26, 2009 4:21 pm

alasizon wrote:One thing that concerns me is leasing aircraft and the way they'd be hit by gate penalties. Not all aircraft end up at the correct airport after the lease and therefore would incur a gate fee to the owning airline which would be unfair to them because it's a system and leasee airline issue.

Two easy fixes for that...

1. At the end of the lease and where the lease is not continued, automatically notify the owner of the leased aircraft that, "said" aircraft is done with it's lease and then the aircraft owner knows it's time to transfer it to his/her leased aircraft boneyard to wait for another lease.

2. Give the leasee the option to a) continue leasing the aircraft, or b) transfer the aircraft back to the leasers boneyard. So basically, if you don't continue the lease, the other option is the system automatically flies the aircraft back to it's originating airport on the last leasee's budget thus terminating the lease.

Which brings up another point. There should be a handfull of airports across the world that are used as aircraft boneyards, where storing aircraft can cost much less than what it would cost to keep an aircraft at a, "maintenance facility" or a "gate". Here is a informative site on boneyards in North America.... http://www.johnweeks.com/boneyard/

JB

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Buzz313th » Thu Nov 26, 2009 4:36 pm

One more thing I just thought of as well...

There are tools already existant in the flightplan option to allow for route scheduling to take the aircraft automatically off the schedule when the said aircraft lands at it's hub/maintenance facility at a predetermined number of legs. For example..... You have a 747 that departs LAX and flies to New York, then Amsterdam, then Chicago and then terminates back at LAX. You decide that after two cycles of that route, and the aircraft is ready for maintenenace under normal flying conditions (no hard landings). You then set that route up in the flightplan page so that each leg only schedules 2 flights of each leg. Then after the 2nd cycle there is no other legs scheduled and the plane is unavailable to fly outa LAX after the 2nd time it lands back home. This works perfect since your maint facility/hub is at LAX and it would be impossible to depart in the 747 since there are no other flights for that particular aircraft leaving LAX. Then you would maintain the aircraft bring it back to 100% and then add it back into the schedule to be flown again for another 2 cycles.

This would further bring more realism into FSA since this is exactly what the real airlines do, they schedule aircraft into the revenue flights until the estimated time to do scheduled maintenance is due, then they are brought offline for maint and the cycle starts all over again.

JB

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by conmanflyer » Thu Nov 26, 2009 5:49 pm

You guys are all talking about smaller airlines with small fleets basically.. a major flaw to be found is what about the airlines that have small crews and a large fleet? how would they transition into this? I have over 50 aircraft right now... maximum of 10 a week go flying, i store my aircraft in Los Angeles, CA and Palm Beach, FL... what i proposed when this issue was brought up about a month ago, was ramps and gates... we all know that an aircraft will normally stay at a gate about 1 day max, 30 minutes minimum, to make room for more aircraft... why not have "RAMP" space where aircraft could be stored with a fee to the airline, but with-out the loading/unloading of passengers... and if a flight lands you go to a gate, then have the aircraft parked at a ramo or ready to go 30min from the time you parked at the gate, then a another aircraft could be pulled into that gate.

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by vaccaro » Thu Nov 26, 2009 6:31 pm

I put my all a/c on top of each other. So basically my fleet counts as 1 a/c :p

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Buzz313th » Thu Nov 26, 2009 6:52 pm

conmanflyer wrote:You guys are all talking about smaller airlines with small fleets basically.. a major flaw to be found is what about the airlines that have small crews and a large fleet? how would they transition into this? I have over 50 aircraft right now... maximum of 10 a week go flying, i store my aircraft in Los Angeles, CA and Palm Beach, FL... what i proposed when this issue was brought up about a month ago, was ramps and gates... we all know that an aircraft will normally stay at a gate about 1 day max, 30 minutes minimum, to make room for more aircraft... why not have "RAMP" space where aircraft could be stored with a fee to the airline, but with-out the loading/unloading of passengers... and if a flight lands you go to a gate, then have the aircraft parked at a ramo or ready to go 30min from the time you parked at the gate, then a another aircraft could be pulled into that gate.
The bottom line here is, active commercial airports only have so much space. The majority of space at Class Bravo and Charlie airports are dedicated to aircraft turnaround. There really is no space for storage unless you wanna pay the airport the equivelent or more of what they would make for gate space and or ramp space. Again, this real estate is at a premium. An airline that has it's act together is gonna maximize revenue for every aircraft turned around and therefore will be able to pay a higher cost for active gate space. Remember the airport not only makes money on the lease for the terminal (gate space) but also makes money from the passengers transiting through the terminals at restaurants, gift shops, bars... So they would rather see the space ustilized for gates and not storage. So again, storage space at a very active airport will probably cost more than gate space considering the airport loses revenue if passengers aren't buying things in the airport terminal.


Read the first post... there are 3 things being included in this idea...

1. Gates: leased or not leased. If leased, you pay a monthly fee per gate with no landing fee or storage fee per aircraft per gate. If not leased, "Transient Gates" will charge the airline a loading/unloading fee at landing and client close. Any aircraft stored at "Transient Gates" for more than 24 hours will cause the system to charge the airline a "Transient Gate" storage fee per 24 hours.

2. Maintenance Facilities: Only can be leased at airports by airlines. Represents leased hanger space, open ramp space (for the maintenenace facility and any storage space for aircraft waiting to be maintained) and "X" number of gates. So, by leasing a maintenance facility from LAX for example, you have now defined your hub, or one of your hubs. The lease of the maintenance facility includes, the ability to maintain your aircraft at a discounted price when maintenance is done at that airport, it includes "So Many Gate Spaces" for shits and giggles lets say it includes 15 gates that are the equivelent of 15 seperate leased gates that you can use to store or load/unload pax at.

3. Low cost storage "Boneyards" that are scattered around the globe at very large airports. These "Boneyards" have vast open space that can be rented by airlines to store thier aircraft for a fraction of the cost when compared to the cost of using a "Gate" to store your aircraft. The one limitation to using these boneyards as storage facilities is that if you have aircraft stored this way, then you can't use the same storage spot to load/unload pax or cargo. You would need to lease a seperate gate or have a maint facility there to do so.

So, to answer your concern, I believe your situation would work this way....
With your 50 aircraft and your 10 flights a week... you would need to decide where your hub will be. Then lease your maint facility at that airport. That would give you around 15 gates to base your hub outa, with the maint facility there, all of your maint done at that airport is at a discounted rate. Now, you need to figure out where your airline wants to fly to... You juggle the costs and decide whether to lease more gates along your routes or just take the hit on your transient fees.. Whenever you have an aircraft away from your hub, that gives you one more open gate to hold an aircraft at no cost. So to figure out how many more gates you need to lease and if you need to store some of your planes at the boneyards is really dependant on the turnaround frequency of your aircraft. The more aircraft flying at any given time will allow for spaces available for your parked aircraft. So... your gonna have to actually plan the management strategy to maximize your profits through the scheduling of your fleet and active pilots. The safe bet would be in your situation would be to get the maint facility and one gate at each destination. Put 25 planes on the active roster and store the other 25 at a boneyard. Your 10 flights per week will keep 10 aircraft in the air and thus open up 10 gates at your hub, which can be used for the extra reserve fleet stored at your hub for an increase flight frequency after you have recruited more pilots and motivated the existing ones to fly more often. Take your 25 planes in the boneyard and offer them up for lease. If flight frequency picks up, then transfer a few planes from the boneyard to the hub. If flight frequency drops, then your not sucha good CEO and you need to liquidate some of your assets to cover loss created by idle resourses not being used. The idea here, is to get dinged for biting off more than you can chew, just like in real life.

JB

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by conmanflyer » Thu Nov 26, 2009 7:03 pm

ya... i think that would work... the reason that i have so many planes though is for weeks like this where i am on basically 24/7 with a plane in the air and planing to get another one in the air 30 minutes after the first landing
so thats my excuse...

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Brian Peace » Thu Nov 26, 2009 7:28 pm

I hoestly think this is a good idea in theory. BUT until they bring in equalization of these kind of things charged BFORE the airlines multiplier goes into it, then I have to say I'd vote it "no" if there was a vote. Too bad there not as open to discuss things like this in the forums as the fellows over at FSE. Without the developrs input on all these "ideas" thread they just sit here and rot here at FSA usually..

If this would be something like airline A pays 5,000,000 per moth for 30 gates at KSFO and airline B pays the same (regardless of eachothers mulitplier)... then it really would be another unfair addition to the game, like maintenance is now. :?
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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Buzz313th » Thu Nov 26, 2009 7:44 pm

Brian Peace wrote:I hoestly think this is a good idea in theory. BUT until they bring in equalization of these kind of things charged BFORE the airlines multiplier goes into it, then I have to say I'd vote it "no" if there was a vote. Too bad there not as open to discuss things like this in the forums as the fellows over at FSE. Without the developrs input on all these "ideas" thread they just sit here and rot here at FSA usually..

If this would be something like airline A pays 5,000,000 per moth for 30 gates at KSFO and airline B pays the same (regardless of eachothers mulitplier)... then it really would be another unfair addition to the game, like maintenance is now. :?

Very true Brian... But it would be easy enough to increase revenue by simply changing the location of the cutoff points that define when and where an airline jumps the multiplier from one to the other. My point would be that the devs could implement this change on a test server or the active server and have a period of 2 months where they watch closely the ballance and then adjust the available revenue through the multiplier or some other means. Also, a change like this might very well reduce the need to ever goto the 25X multiplier, for example, the biggest airline could top off at a multiplier of lets say 100X. There is no doubt that if this was implemented, that there would have to be adjustments made to help ballance everything out, but thats a given... since change in costs will require change in income. Who knows, the change could very well make people take airline management more seriously, thus making those airlines much more profitable. We will never know until it is tried and in my humble oppinion, if nothing is done at all, FSA will still continue to be a free for all with no real motivation to get organised.

The biggest hardship for airline management in the real world, is the struggle to read into the future market share and then to purchase/sell resourses to take advantage of the current market conditions. We saw exactly this after 911 when the price wars ended between the airlines and alot of airlines who had numerous aircraft orders pending from Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier declared bancruptsy because they couldn't supply the passengers for thier newly purchased aircraft nor opt out of the contracts with the aircraft manufacturers or the leasing companies.

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Brian Peace » Thu Nov 26, 2009 7:47 pm

Don't get me wrong at all JB your ideas are great, although there really not "new" here this has been discussed a lot in the past. You add a different spin to it which I like though. As long as it's a level playing feild for ALL airlines as far as buying gates / paying maintenance / paying ramp fees etc... I am ALL FOR IT.

The only thing the initial multiplier should be for is the "help" to purchase aircraft as a new airline. The expenses should be "equal" to all, according to their income, thus simulating a more true economy for all.

EDIT: IF ** and that's the big IF.. that's what the dev's want. I'm led to beleive by some comments made by some of the admin here that they'd prefer to not go there... and that FSA should be more about the fun..
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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Buzz313th » Thu Nov 26, 2009 7:58 pm

Brian Peace wrote:EDIT: IF ** and that's the big IF.. that's what the dev's want. I'm led to beleive by some comments made by some of the admin here that they'd prefer to not go there... and that FSA should be more about the fun..

I have the feeling as well that the devs "Dont wanna go there". It would take coding, recoding and a definate beta period to strike a ballance. Hell, I don't mind discussing it with no expectations. You never know, maybe some other very tallented programers will see the oportunity and create a whole knew FS environment. I was in FSEconomy and have not flown there since finding FSA as it's more along my interest and the fact that new ideas in FSEconomy almost always got shot down. I guess FSE started as a Bush Flying organization and is probably gonna stay that way, where FSA started as an environment designed for VA's and will hopefully look at some other ideas to help deepen the simulation thus guarantee the gameplay longevity to keep people from getting borred.

Most of these FS environments are great fun when you just get introduced to it, but after a period of time you realise that it's the same old "Rinse And Repeat", and then you burn out and lose interest and move onto the next environment. I would personally like to see one of these environments take the bull by the horns and continue development to make things continually interesting. And for the record, I have no problem paying for a subscription to be apart of that.

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Alaskan Flyboy » Fri Nov 27, 2009 7:35 am

Buzz313th wrote:
Alaskan Flyboy wrote:Given I was a former flight student who's flight school had an MEL for their training aircraft, I'm quite familiar with the door-stop/make-shift-weapon-to-beat-a-terrorist-to-death-with. It think it had to have added 20 pounds to our weight and balance in those poor Cherokees. :mrgreen:
LOL, I don't think a Cherokee has an MEL. Wouldn't it just be a squawked item that isn't required for that particular flight?


JB
Any aircraft can have a MEL. UND actually went to the trouble of developing a MEL for all it's aircraft, including the Cherokees. Without it, there's a lot of things that would ground the planes being the aircraft are considered "for hire". They also got FAA permission to do the annual checks in stages throughout the year, though I forget the official term for that.

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Alaskan Flyboy » Fri Nov 27, 2009 7:42 am

Brian Peace wrote:The only thing the initial multiplier should be for is the "help" to purchase aircraft as a new airline. The expenses should be "equal" to all, according to their income, thus simulating a more true economy for all.
I'm still not quite grasping how the multipliers would help purchase new aircraft if all the expenses were also multiplied by it. You would end up with the exact same profit as if you had no multiplier at all.

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Re: Hubs Maintenance Facilities And Gates

Post by Brian Peace » Fri Nov 27, 2009 9:42 am

Alaskan flyboy:

A A34--600 for example is about 240 million dollars. It's 240 million dollars wether your multiplier is 1000x or 25x... 240 million is 240 million. period.

At your 1000x multiplier it's pretty dang easy for you to make this much money isn't it?

Check the flight logs of BC NORTH and see how much we make per flight. Therein lies the difference. You (with your 1000x multiplier) can afford that plane in very, very few flights. We on the other hand may have to complete upwards of 200 flights, to raise that money (or fly large cargo or pax ops 100 times or so)...

Is that black and white enough for you? :lol:
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