some thought about more realistic

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VegasTim
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by VegasTim » Thu Nov 01, 2018 6:56 am

Yeah that would probably be the safest way too, could back out of any new item that has issues without affecting others. We are being proactive and setting our own 'standards' for Jan 1. All aircraft to have current annual inspections, aircraft shall not be posted for sale with an outdated annual inspection, our multiplier we will voluntarily drop to 25x and we will track a 60 day list for aircraft not flown.

For the record, 60 days is pretty quick and many owners will have problems keeping all their birds in the air every 60 days. But if owners look at the whole picture, they are going to have to perform annual inspections anyway so the maintenance status hit really is not going to be that big of an issue.
In general an A service can be covered in one or two flights, so that is not a lot to ask of owners in order to keep parked aircraft from becoming unprofitable.

I am hoping when an aircraft is hit with a 60 day status penalty, owners will get an auto message notification like they do now with aircraft sold.

Really liking the fact FSA is adapting and improving with the times. Keep up the great work Joe!
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by wings138 » Wed Nov 07, 2018 7:50 pm

Hi everyone, and Joe.

This is a lot of reading to catch up on everything. But I like it so far. The idea of keeping it simple is great. So now my input.

Hubs, great, I love it, was actually asking about something a while ago as VAFinancials already has one, if we can do it something like this, have the ability to assign aircraft to a hub, and a hub director. So a hub I see would be a great thing to add for this. Having a discount, a home for an aircraft, etc.

Then the revamping of the cargo system would be warmly welcomed, as I do like flying cargo and seeing it make some money would be nice.

Landing fees, I think you said by weight was the most popular, then I say use that.

Keeping fees down, lets say just a small percent, so those airlines that don't do a lot of flying (few Pilots), can keep up with out going bankrupted, and the busy airlines can see that it is just another cost factor in doing business.

Mothballing fleets, I guess, I don't think I'd want to mothball much, but there is another factor here, being real airlines slowly part out the aircraft, and after they are done, have the aircraft destroyed, so maybe have a time limit where they can be here, say for one year, after that they get scrapped. Unless they are brought out of Mothballing. Just a thought might be too much for now.

So, for airports and hubs, maybe if you start this up early, it will make more sense for all to see and as you implement the landing/parking fees you can see how everything is going to work. Just a thought.

Anyway, keep working and let's have some fun.
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by joefremont » Wed Dec 12, 2018 7:07 pm

I know I have gone quiet on this and you may have thought nothing was being done but I am in fact still working on the Loan and Bankruptcy system. That may not be on the top of many of your lists but for advanced finance its the foundation that everything else will be built on. Loans is just about done and I am currently working on bankruptcy resolution.

The multipliers levels have been re-done. They will still start at 1000x and drop by about 30% each 500m until it bottoms out at 25x at 5b. This is actually more generous until you reach 1.5b and overall it will take about twice as many flights to reach 5b. Another change to this is the multiplier will be based on your total assets, including leased aircraft. The multiplier is supposed to help you build your large airline, but if you have leased a bunch of aircraft, you already have a large airline.

As for the client I am also working on getting the final 2.2.1 ready for final release. Making the mac version was a big stumbling block but I recently noticed that for the last six months nobody is using the old OSX client so nobody will be kicked off the system by my releasing a new official version. One thing I do want to do is deal with the problem with the windows plug in client for X-Plane, for many users it causes X-Plane to crash. I need to either fix it or remove it before I do a stable release.
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flugkapitan
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by flugkapitan » Wed Dec 12, 2018 8:10 pm

Hi Joe,

Thanks for keeping us in the loop!

Regards,
Scott
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"...now let's get this thing on the hump - we've got some flyin' to do!" ~ Major Kong

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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by joefremont » Wed Mar 06, 2019 6:14 am

I just had a brain wave.

Hangers!

Obviously aircraft sitting out on the tarmac will deteriorate quicker than aircraft sitting inside hangers. Would allowing VA's to build hangers at airports be of interest, aircraft parked in the hanger would not be subject to parking fees and deteriorate less than aircraft parked outside.

Would there be of any interest in this idea?
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by MrJTSZ » Thu Mar 07, 2019 1:29 pm

joefremont wrote:
Wed Mar 06, 2019 6:14 am
I just had a brain wave.

Hangers!

Obviously aircraft sitting out on the tarmac will deteriorate quicker than aircraft sitting inside hangers. Would allowing VA's to build hangers at airports be of interest, aircraft parked in the hanger would not be subject to parking fees and deteriorate less than aircraft parked outside.

Would there be of any interest in this idea?
Yes please. For example, aircraft who "sleep" at the HUB base could be hangared, and out his base could be parked outside.
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by wings138 » Thu Mar 07, 2019 11:53 pm

joefremont wrote:
Wed Mar 06, 2019 6:14 am
I just had a brain wave.

Hangers!

Obviously aircraft sitting out on the tarmac will deteriorate quicker than aircraft sitting inside hangers. Would allowing VA's to build hangers at airports be of interest, aircraft parked in the hanger would not be subject to parking fees and deteriorate less than aircraft parked outside.

Would there be of any interest in this idea?
Great Idea Here... How soon could you get something like this working?
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joefremont
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by joefremont » Fri Mar 08, 2019 1:55 am

Well I have Just about gotten maintenance centers done and am working out the aircraft depreciation when they are parked.

The more I think about this, not sure how useful it is, even if in a hanger bi-annual maintenance will still be needed, hangering it may not make economic sense and may just be the same as the 'reserved parking spaces' we discussed. Its something we can certainly add later.

Not sure if we discussed this, are airlines not using the fees still required to do bi-annual maintenance to fly there aircraft?

Are private aircraft going to also be affected by the fees/maintenance requirements?
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by Cat » Fri Mar 08, 2019 10:21 pm

Not sure if we discussed this, are airlines not using the fees still required to do bi-annual maintenance to fly there aircraft?
We are using our own financial spreadsheets for each aircraft and they are required in our airline to have annual inspections UNLESS stored long term in Kingman AZ (KIGM). At the time someone wants to pull an aircraft out of long term storage, if the annual inspection/service is overdue or due within 30 days, said aircraft cannot fly until the annual / A service is performed.
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by joefremont » Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:48 pm

As I just mentioned I have been working on the maintenance change we have been talking about, and I have been thinking about two of the new requirements we are thinking of.

You can't sell if not maintained within a year
You can't fly if not maintained within two years

Now when we turn these features on its going to effect a lot of aircraft, there are 28k aircraft in db, about 8700 (30%) have never been maintained, and 19k (68%) have not been maintained in the last year and 16k (57%) have not been maintained in the last two years. I have been planning to marking aircraft that have not been maintained within a very long time as if they had been more recently so this does not hit everyone at once, but at the same time I don't want reset everyone so the feature does not go into effect for many months. My first idea is that for all aircraft that have not been maintained in the last 6 months add a maintenance record for some random time between 6-25 months. With that adjustment, there would be about 11k(40%) that had not been maintained in the last year but only 900 (3%) that had not been maintained in the last two years.

And if anyone felt there airline had been too badly effected by this I would make an adjustment for them.

What does everyone think of this?
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by joefremont » Sat Mar 09, 2019 8:55 pm

Maintenance centers are now released and I described it in this post:

viewtopic.php?f=60&t=9428&p=44992#p44992

Hopefully the aircraft depreciation and flight / sale restrictions based on when the aircraft was maintained and parking fees will be ready by the end of the month.
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by joefremont » Fri Mar 15, 2019 6:18 am

Now that maintenance centers is deployed and seams to be finally working I have turned my attention to those parking fees. First step is creating a 'parking log' of all those aircraft movements so I can keep track of how much time an aircraft spends at each airport and have made progress on that. Next I need to start on the transaction generator, there were some discussion as to how the transactions would be generated. I was thinking they should be grouped either by airport/fleet or by airport/fleet/aircraft (if an ac was moved between fleets during the month, each fleet needs a transaction). Maybe a flag on the VA settings where you can choose, or would it be better to select that by fleet?

The rates themselves would be as we discussed earlier.
My first though is have it start at 8v$ per metric ton of MLW per day with a 100v$ minimum at super airports and those numbers would go down 1v$ per ton with a 5v$ minimum at municipal airports. I don't know how to handle private/military airports as they generally don't let just anybody park there private planes there.
I figure private/military would be the same as municipal, fleet home base gets a 50% discount, storage airports are 90% discount (or free?) but also no revenue from flights to/from those airports. First two hours after landing are free. Well I figured I would add up the total hours for the AC at the airport and subtract 2 hours for each landing.

Sound like a plan?
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by Cat » Fri Mar 15, 2019 5:42 pm

We track all aircraft revenue individually, so we would prefer to have a billing system "per aircraft".... but also how will it be billed? By month? By week? By the day? If we have to log every parking fee for every aircraft daily into our own financial records, that will become a huge workload hassle.... if it's by the fleet, then we would need a way to break down fleet expenses when an aircraft changes fleets within the company.

All operators should have a means of tracking this new expense as it may show them having X amount of airplanes per pilot is not cost effective. Even small amounts; "chump change" as it were, will add up rapidly for small operators with large fleets. "Collectors" specifically will be the most impacted.

Will there be a minimum stay requirement for long term parking?

Regarding the Military/private airport issue: it may be best for our purposes to give that a bye for now ..... just group them with others.... Some "military airports" in FSX in the USA have been since decommissioned and are now municipal airports, so you would have that whole wad of spider web mess to sort through location by location. Time consumed vs realized effect - have to consider that as well in your work.
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by joefremont » Fri Mar 15, 2019 10:51 pm

The plan is to do it once a month and should probably make an easy way to export a CSV file for all the transactions so you can more easily import the values. As you do not want too much workload hassle, I don't want too many transactions records bloating the size of my database.

I turned on the code that started recording the aircraft movement for parking last night, already it has over 800 records in it.

I have started on adding the different colored dots for maintenance, normals green, blue if more than one year and magenta if more than two years. Once past two years not only can you not fly it, you can't transfer it either, since that would require flying it to the next destination. So if you don't have a center at the airport the aircraft is located you have to get the mobile FSA service team to come fix it for full price, but I don't feel the need punish airlines more by forcing additional price.

To give some comparison of the numbers, let's look at the 747-400ER I have in my fleet. Maintenance at full price is 6,187,608 v$, at max discount in a center its 1,546,902 v$. At the 8 v$ per day rate for super airports I suggested, full price for a years parking would be 863,569 v$. Move it to a municipal airport and its 107,946 v$. That does not include the 'fleet base' discount, that cuts it in half again.
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Re: some thought about more realistic

Post by Cat » Sat Mar 16, 2019 1:27 pm

"move it to a municipal airport" .... tearing up the pavement in the process :shock:

One of the items where we try to separate the "gaming" from the "reality" .... In order to fly an aircraft into a particular airport, we require the pilot to show proof of "real world precedent". This means they have to show the airport runway weight bearing loads can not only support said aircraft but there has been documented evidence of an aircraft of similar size and weight in that airport.

Boise, Idaho for example .... we might get a huge break on parking fee's to leave our 777's there, but in reality the largest aircraft in/out of Boise is FedEx's A300's.

So for our purposes in FSA, do we break the realism rule to avoid excessive fee's .... thereby negating the purpose of parking fee's to make things more realistic ..... or do we allow each airline to have a "major hub" where they can park all their big birds for a fraction of the cost provided they have a service center there as well (25% to match service discount). Airline Hub without a service center only gets your 50% discount .... just a thought to make service centers look even more appealing to owners.

Again, as I have stated in the past at times irritating others (for which I do apologize) - A lot of the actual "realism" comes down to the owners/pilots themselves. We cannot expect FSAirlines to make every rule for everyone to HAVE to conform to. The "gamers" who prefer to use FSA more as a video game to rack up huge profits and land big jets in impossible situations .... also pay the same fee for Platinum membership .... So it's a fine line FSA/Joe have to walk to keep everyone happy ...... a task that is next to impossible. You are doing great work Joe for us who prefer the realism side!
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