So, the other day, I was watching an episode of the American TV show, "Air Disasters," and I was inspired.
How about enterprises sporadically have one of their aircraft crash? Now, I'm certainly not saying this should just be a random thing. It will have some sort of an algorithm behind it based on the following;
Your maintenance provider (if it is bad)
The age of the aircraft (if it is old)
Your pilots' salaries (if they are low)
Your pilots' training (if they were never re-trained)
Your aircraft's condition (if it is low)
Also, if a weather feature is ever implemented (which would, I'm assuming, be implemented no earlier than years from now,) that would also affect a specific flight.
If the plane was to crash, it would no longer appear in "Fleet Management," and it's schedule would be erased. It would be as if you just canceled a leasing agreement on the aircraft. If you had been leasing the aircraft, you would have to pay the leasing provider the rest of what you'd pay over time to fully own the aircraft. Clearly, this would make someone angry, so crashes would be infrequent. Also, there could be certain limits that the player could be informed of to help them prevent their aircraft from crashing; such as how little they can safely pay their pilots before they get angry and fly the plane into the ground.
Please share with me your thoughts on this idea. Are there more things that could affect a crash? Should other things happen when a plane crashes? Is this a stupid idea entirely?
I don't really think a pilot is going to be so angry because of the small wage he is being paid that he'd deliberately fly a plane into the ground, presumably after knocking out the co-pilot. I mean, maybe someone might do that, but I don't see it as something happening more than maybe once, ever.
Any kind of plane can crash... new, old, well-maintained, shoddily kept, and whether the pilot was new or the pilot had 30+ years of service and experience. Making an algorithm without randomness wouldn't do much. So long as you never used old aircraft and used one of the two best maintenance providers (which everyone should be doing, by the way), then there'd be no real chance there's a crash. So, having crashes would be moot in that case. There'd have to be some kind of randomness involved otherwise it would be like making sure you had at least 100% maintenance ratio. So long as you had the 100%, there's no crashes.
In the real world, companies have insurance companies to cover such happenings. They pay a hefty price in premiums so if there is a crash, the insurance pays off the plane, the collateral damage, and reparations for any lives lost. There's no such insurance in AS, and I believe to complete realism, you'd have to do something like include insurance. The damages and such from crashes are immense. They can climb into the billions of dollars if it's a large plane and enough lives are lost. Asking a company to shoulder that kind of payment (even if it's scaled down drastically) could easily end up burying it and making it impossible to climb out of.
I have thought in the past that such horrific moments could be assimilated into AS, but I've personally not figured out a way to make it fit without either being too weak or too destructive to a company.
I don't really think a pilot is going to be so angry because of the small wage he is being paid that he'd deliberately fly a plane into the ground, presumably after knocking out the co-pilot. I mean, maybe someone might do that, but I don't see it as something happening more than maybe once, ever.
I agree that the wage won't be the reason to crash an airplane, but unfortunately it (most probebly) happend before the an airplane crashed because of a suicide of a crew member
I know of at least two incidents where a suicide of one of the crew member is a possible reason for the crash.
One is flight MS 990 (JFK-CAI) in 1999 (altough this conclusion is controversial) and the second - a very recent one - TM 470 (MPM-LAD) last year in Namibia. I don't know if they are more incidents related to a suicide (attempts). However, unfortunately it is not as rare as one could hope. :(
It would be very difficult to consider the psychology of the pilots employeed here at our airlines. The topic of "crashes" was discussed many times I think and there are too many aspects speaking against such a feature. "caithes" is right that there are - regardless of a viable algorithm - too many missing tools.
Also, if a weather feature is ever implemented (which would, I'm assuming, be implemented no earlier than years from now,) that would also affect a specific flight.
This was also discussed several times. Imagine real-weather data. It wuold be very difficult to deal with bad weather because the paid employees are doing "nothing". You - as a player (CEO) - would have to deal with a mess of a huge disruption of your schedules.
It is also difficult to reflect the way how a country deals with weather and some regions are generally stronger affected by bad weather compared to sunny countries. It would be very difficult to implement the different approaches of the regions.
For example, Canada, Scandinavia and Finland as well others deal generally fine with much snow. This is probably due to the fact that they are better prepared. Many parts of Germany copes in snowy conditions more like a country with no knowledge of snow despite the fact that we are living in a climate zone with the potential of snow. "Breaking News - heavy snowfall, we counted 67 flakes, 30 departures cancelled, please contact the arline with the crane on the tail". OK, years ago German airports dealt better due to in-house departments doing all the work. Even a big German airline had its own de-icing-department but this is another topic.
Our AS-airlines lack a flight ops with real emloyees to deal with cancellations or the tools to minimize disruptions. A big US-airline can - for example - shut down one affected hub and the other flights and hubs are operating normally.
We have no insurance (as mentioned) and I see no positive effect of accidents. Accidents are not destined to improve the way to manage an airline. There is generally something fundamentally wrong with an airline to play with safety.
As mentioned by MD-80 ....... these Ideas wether crashes , weather and other external influences are already on the to do lists as things to consider in the future . For the moment this is not planned nor discussed since we don't know how to make it equal and balanced for everybody also considering that a lot of players are not looking into the game for days if not weeks if they are on holiday or in hospital or other things happening in RL. So for the moment ... sorry but it will not happen soon.
It hits smaller airlines, while larger ones can compensate it more easily. Or you would have to introduce insurances, thus just adding another cost position to the PLA.
AS is not about managing one time incidents, so I don't think this fits into the concept as discussed already in the past.
Has been discussed several times and I don't think there's a way to get it into the game. I've watched the series myself - I think almost every episode, and there are a lot - and I've learned one thing: You can never be sure to not crash. It might be safer on EU/US airlines, but given bad weather conditions, human error, "bad luck" and so on... any plane could crash. So your proposed "factors" don't work for me as they are as good or bad as a dozen others. It's even possible to calculate a likeliness of crashing depending on the color of the underwear of the passenger on seat 12F.