FSAirlines

nothing

When we do the cargo updates there will be a way to limit the payload on the flight either when booking or when starting the flight in the client.

I am getting close to getting loans and bankruptcy finished after that its
- Maintenance
- Parking
- Cargo

Loans and Bankruptcy has proven to be more complicated than I thought when I started so its taking a longer than I expected, but should be ready soon.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

@cat, me too, as you can see, I also stopped to answer here...
Lets go for a beer and spam each other with stupid comments. You are very welcome.

Yes lets not use the S word here to criticize. Everyone's experience is different and valid. As long as the they are trying to be constructive all input is good.

nothing

wings138 wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 19, 2018 3:47 am

Cat wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 18, 2018 11:20 pm

@Stacy: What is your problem with the stupid comments? If you goal is to get others to stop making comments, job well done. I'm out.

if you don't want to hear it keep your comments that don't pertain to yourself, there.

OK lets cool it! If someone makes a comment you don't agree with its OK to say you don't agree and say why but its not acceptable to insult other members. Even if someone makes a comment you think is stupid (I don't think that by the way), they have the right to say it as long as they are not being insulting towards anybody else.

@Cat: I want to personally and publicly apologize to you for not having said more sooner. I would not be running this site if I did not value the people who use it and I do not want to see this kind of abuse.

Ok Stacy, nobody wants to insult your intelligence, and after that latest comment I understand a little bit better, what you meant. Still dont know, why you have to edit 2000 flight, probably you made a notice, how much fuel you need or somethink like that.

An unexpected tail wind is very rare, when you make your flight planing with simbrief, this tool calculates the fuel with wind. But yes, the best tool does not help, when the airplane burns more or less then calculated. PMDG does a perfect job, but you told, that some (and probaly you) are flying with standard or freeware aircrafts. I can talk only about FSX at this point. The standard B737 burns much more than expected, you probably found that out already This effect is well known and described in some simboards. In the aircraft.cfg is the line: PMDG has this parameter set to 1.2105
You may give it a try and "correct" this scalar from 1 to 1.2105 in your config and test on a short flight, if the burned fuel is correspondending to the calculation in simbrief (dont forget to setup the right plane and load while planning). I would love to help you with this task, but I deleted all unused planes from my sim, so I have no standard 737 anymore installed.

Wish you a relaxed christmas time.

I just started flying cargo in the PMDG Boeing 777-200F. I am not sure if any cargo changes have been made since this thread started.

I like the current cargo simulation so far! Depending on the size of the airport, I have gotten loads from 33% ZFW to 100% ZFW and some in between. I like the load variation. Always flying at 100% ZFW gets boring sometimes.

Keep up the good work Joe!

Actually I have not made any changes so far, so it does not depend on airport size, but that is on the list to do.

I have been working on this, here is my plan so far. The system will generate a number of 'packages' ever day, each will be placed at a random airport and will have to be delivered to a specific airport. these will be of several sizes:

25 kg: just about any aircraft can carry these but will be delivered to an airport within 100-400 nm.
100 kg: Any aircraft that can carry more than 200 kg of cargo can carry these, will be delivered to an airport 300-3000 nm away.
1000 kg: Most wide body and dedicated cargo aircraft that can carry more than 4000 kg of cargo can carry these.
10000 kg: Dedicated cargo aircraft with nose or tail loading doors that can carry at least 20000 kg of cargo can carry these, including the L-100/C-130, 747 Cargo, Beluga, Il-76, etc. Only about 60 of these will be generated a day.
100,000 kg: This is a gift to those who operate the AN-124 and AN-225 as only those aircraft will be big enough to handle them. Only 6 of these will be generated a day.

In general a package will be created and if not picked up in 2-4 weeks will be deleted. Once picked up an airline has 4 days to deliver it and get the full revenue. After than the revenue drops by 20% a day until the end of two weeks, when it expires (yes if you can loose money if you deliver it in more than 9 days). Once picked up you can transfer it to other aircraft in your VA or a warehouse, service centers will get small warehouses as part of them and you will be able to build dedicated warehouses.

So far I am thinking of only two types of packages, normal and 'priority' which will get more revenue but you will have less time to deliver it.

Not a lot of response from that last post, I hope you all are still interested.

I have had some more thoughts on this and wanted to share them.

One idea I had as far as managing the cargo. I had some ideas on how to manage it.

When a pilot books a flight they would be shown a screen that would show all the packages at the airport they are starting from that are going to there destination or to an airport within 200 nm of the airport they are going to and they could select them to move to there aircraft.

There would also a manage package screen that would allow pilots/managers to move packages to aircraft or warehouses. Pilots would be able to move packages in the airport they are in, to aircraft they are allowed to book or to warehouses owned by fleets whose aircraft they are allowed to book. Managers could handle packages in any airport as long as they have 'fleet' permission for the aircraft/warehouses they are moving too/from. I have thought about creating a new 'Cargo' permission for this but at the moment I am not sure it is necessary.

Anyone can move cargo on or off an aircraft if it has a 'free for booking' status but once a pilot has booked a flight only they can move cargo onto or off the booked aircraft. Once the pilot pushes 'fly' in the client the cargo on that aircraft will then be locked and can not be changed until they either land or cancel the flight.

I though it might be useful to give pilots the option, if they arrived close to the packages destination to mark the package as delivered, they would then have to pay for ground transport to get it to its final destination, the cost for that would be 1% of the original payment for each nm from where its located to where it needs to be, yes that could make the payment go negative.

It also occurred to me that once a package was claimed by an airline they may realize they won't be able to deliver it. I was thinking that as long as they have not moved it they could pay some penalty and release the package back to the pool of unclaimed packages. The fee may be something like 1/16 the value of the package at the end of day 1 to 100% the value at the end of day 4.

I have also been thinking about how warehouses would work. As a starting point I thought, suppose a VA decided to park an old 747 at an airport and use it like a warehouse. It could hold over 100,000 kg of cargo, as long as its parked you would not need to worry about maintenance and all you would need to pay is the parking fee. So maintaining a warehouse needs to cost less than that. Warehouses would build on what we added for maintenance centers. Maintenance centers themselves would have an attached warehouse that could hold an amount equal to 1/4 the maximum size of the aircraft they can work on (no extra cost).

As you can see I have been thinking about this a lot, but have only just started on coding it, so your feedback would be very helpful in shaping how this will work, especially if it arrives before I get too far into developing it.

More ideas.

Pricing model. I am basing the payment for delivering a package on the same formulas we use for ticket pricing, assuming 100kg of cargo compares to the cost of one economy passenger.

25kg packages would pay 2x the economy rate
100kg packages would pay 1.5x,
1000kg packages would pay 1.25x,
10000kg packages 2x and 100,000kg packages 2.5x.

The formula for old style loose cargo would change to be more like the passenger formula but would be equal or less than the equivalent economy passenger. Each airport would have some amount of loose cargo calculated like we do passengers now for both cargo that could be picked up and delivered to. No single flight could use up more that 25% of the pickup/delivery limit.

I actually have made good progress on the program that creates the packages, it creates about 80k packages a day and is distributing them to about 4000 airports, hopefully that will be enough. Trying to find a balance between creating packages at airports/routes that are actually used and putting packages in the lesser served airports. I would not want to overwhelm the database with lots of packages that will never be used.

That's probably enough info for tonight, think I will relax a bit and maybe do a flight.

Happy flying.

No comments? I don't want to spend a lot of time implementing this if nobody is interested.

Hi, looks great. I plan to resume my little company again over here. Company is named as Q2 Logistics.
So, could be handy that I can carry some logistic ops.

Kind Regards,
Timo / www.q2logistics.be