Of course, flight itinerary had been deleted from flight planning. Seems like a weird bug as it says flights are booked though there are not any more scheduled flights and everything is cancelled.
I think this relates to your changelog: ## v6.11.5 - 2025-07-15 ### Changed
** Flight numbers can only be deleted if there are no booked flights left, including completed and cancelled ones. This applies to closing a station as well.*
BUT there are no flights booked, all have been cancelled. The flight number SHOULD be deleting now and it’s not.
It makes no sense whatsoever in the way you made it be now. It’s the most silly and “wtf” thing I have ever seen in Airlinesim.
I cannot liberate those flight numbers to be newly used in scheduling new flights. So now you want to tell me I have to actually wait 3 days until the cancelled flight numbers disappear from the screen?
That’s the most ridiculous thing and a true “wtf” moment, I am left at awe and with “are you serious, you must be kidding me” repeating over and over in my head. It’s probably one of the very few “don’t touch what’s not broken” things I have seen over the years in Airlinesim.
Can you tell me at least one thing how it benefits me as a player to have it working this way? Because I can name several things where it actually hugely inconveniences the player.
Liberating flight numbers for scheduling. Maybe I don’t have any more flight numbers and need them NOW to schedule a different flight. Not in 3 days, I need them NOW.
Making a mess by leaving flight number instances when testing ORS under different circumstance (schedule - verify - cancel method).
Wrong scheduling that needs to be stepped back.
Accidentally activating flight with no seats, flight gets instanced, you cancel and need to redo the flights with the same flight numbers.
And many many more…
With no offense and don’t take this personally, but even watching Netflix would make your time better spent than dedicating it to breaking things up under the ruse of whatever supposed sense this “feature” is supposed to have. Real improvements are always appreciated, but this is absolutely the most unreasonable and illogical step backward.
I really couldn’t agree more.For large airlines, it is very inconvenient to wait for three days without extra flight numbers. Nothing to do but wait, this update reduces the playability of the game
Yeah. I noticed they don’t delete sometimes even though there are actually no flights. I should be able to delete any number when there are no scheduled flights.
The short answer is that a 3rd party data access library we use made some (sensible) changes under the hood which broke our previous behavior. And I was neither willing nor able to spend the time required to implement a workaround at the time.
The slightly longer answer is that a workaround obviously wouldn’t be rocket science and likely wouldn’t take more than an afternoon to implement. But looking at the immediate feature roadmap and the changes it will bring to the ORS/DS I didn’t want to invest the time in this particular area right now. There’s a high chance that a few things around flight instancing will have to change. The instancing window might become longer and the revenue accounting model for bookings might change from the ground up. This could mean, for example, that flight instances generally have to stick around longer for accounting/compensation purposes. An example of a potential scenario: You cancel a flight that was part of interlining itineraries. Now have to compensate an interlining partners whose bookings have been cancelled as well. But this might have to be processed by a BSP first. Note, this is just a pretty wild “What could be?” example…but you get the idea. At the end of the day, this might work without any effects on flight instancing at all so I can reinstate the old behavior. But I don’t know this yet.
I know that some large airlines that refuse to split into subsidiaries struggle with flight number availability. But if having to wait 3 additional days for a flight number to be freed breaks your workflows, it might make sense to review them.
@martin I don’t want to sound as the “troublemaker guy” but this changed in July 15, and from change log it appears to be an intentional and planned change on AS part. So at least to my non-expert eye it seems difficult to understand why a library change is claimed to be a culprit if the change seems to have been done intentionally. It’s not like this became an issue by an unexpected library change behavior in the background, but rather as a thought out modification in the behavior that got its own changelog.
# v6.11.5 - 2025-07-15 ### Changed
** Flight numbers can only be deleted if there are no booked flights left, including completed and cancelled ones. This applies to closing a station as well.*
You can read it that way, I guess. But it’s under “Changed”, which doesn’t really imply any reason for why, just that people might want to be aware of the fact. Technically, this was a bugfix, because I was made aware of the issue by people who noticed that they simply got an internal server error when deleting flight numbers that had remaining flight instances. But since the the fix introduced a change in behavior, it ended up under…well…changes. I hope that suffices as an explanation.
Personally, i use the close station feature to track which airport works for me and which doesn’t. if i see the load is obviously bad, i will cancel the flight early and close the station down, in case i can’t check and close the station again after the 3-day booking period. You basically can’t do this any more. I actually care less about if i can reuse the flight number or not.
I think if the behaviour stays as is, I hope we can have a function to close the station down automatically after the last flight (cancelled or scheduled) because now I would need to go back within the week cycle and close the station manually. If not, i think the station will just go down to the n/a (station with no data) list… which is far less convenience to remember and close down. If you close the station automatically, you would also delete the flight number, which might help to also solve that reusability issue.
Not right now, no. I have a somewhat hard deadline for the preview game world in about three weeks, so my focus is 100% on that at the moment. Once that’s live, I will return my attention to the ORS-DS hybrid in general and bulk generation of travel requests in particular. As part of that, I will probably revisit the related flight instancing topics, depending on what’s next.
I see. I can’t shake the feeling that this is a symptom of a missing, better feature that should exist for this particular purpose. I know that many (if not all) players - myself if included if I actually get around to playing the game - basically open stations as a sort of “to-do list”. Which is a bit weird because just imagine a large network carrier in reality just sprinkling stations all over a continent, each with a clerk pushing pencils all day, waiting to do something someday
Jokes aside, I figure that in travel lingo, a potential or actual place to fly to would be called a destination for strategic purposes, while a station is a very much operational concept that only becomes required once you actually open routes. Maybe we need that additional layer of abstraction to manage exactly that sort of thing…keeping track of potential places to fly to and evaluating their performance once you do.
