Demand/Supply model for landning fees

English Boards Suggestions and Ideas
1

Hi!

One of the main complaints in the game is that it stops being fun once all slots are gone.

I also understand this is one of the main reason for people getting bored and quitting, and also for old servers being less interesting.

My suggestion is simple, introduce variable landing fees to gradually force airlines that traffic slot blocked larger airports into using larger airplanes. This means they have to substitute several smaller aircraft for one large and thus opening up slots for expansion.

The base landing fee we have now is good as a starting point.

The suggestion is that the final fee is modified depending on slot availability.

0 - 50% slots taken the fee will gradually go down to a minimum of say 25% normal price to promote any airlines flying any kind of airplane (even small ones) to traffic the airport.

50 - 90% slots taken the fee will gradually go back to the standard fee.

90 - 100% slots taken and the fee will gradually increase up to 400% of normal price (or even higher) to force any airlines flying smaller airplanes away and stop them from blocking the busy runways.

I think this also has the advantage of automatically taking care of any exploiting players that are not reported even if they use small airplanes to consciously block slots in a large airport. Once the slots start to run out they are in for some serious financial problems!!!

It also would feel very realistic to have airports that react depending on the situation.

It should be easy to implement since slots available already is displayed. And I don't think it would add much server load at all since you only need to update this once a day (when the airport updates) and it's just a quick check.

% Numbers are only a suggestion, feel free to debate them.

1 Like
2

...There's (somehow) a way around this (I use it myself to allow for later growth).

But you have to invest more effort in scheduling your planes.

The idea is: schedule your small planes such that they can later be replaced with larger planes.

Let's assume we want to deploy in PEK a fleet of CRJ 700s to be later replaced with A321.

I will use the example for the route PEK - NNG.

Check flight times for both planes:

CR7:

PEK-NNG: Flight time 2:58

Turnaround time: 0:20

NNG-PEK: Flight time 2:58

Turnaround time: 1:00

A321:

PEK-NNG: Flight time 2:56

Turnaround time: 0:30

NNG-PEK: Flight time 2:56

Turnaround time: 1:00

So now it's pretty obvious that you have to leave exactly 6 minutes extra in NNG when you schedule the CR7, so that it can later be replaced with the 321 (6 minutes = 10 mins extra turnaround for the 321 vs. CR7 - 2 x 2 minutes shorter flight duration 321 vs. CR7).

There is just one subtlety here for when you fly from PEK (or whatever your desired hub) to other airport B where there is a significant probability that in time also a slot problem could appear (in the example chosen e.g. CAN, PVG, ICN). 

Here you must also be careful to protect the slots at the arrival airport...

In other words if you fly with the CR7 to a potentially busy airport to which the flight time is, say, two minutes longer than that of the 321, then you DO NOT schedule it such as the CR7 arrives at a time of any of the form xx:x1, xx:x2, xx:x5 or xx:x6, since then when replacing with the A321 you may need the anterior slot which might be already taken (assuming you are forced to use an exact departure time at your hub).

Of course, you use the same strategy for the return flight... E.g. you do NOT schedule a return flight XXX 17:34 - PEK 20:25 with the CR7 when the flight with the 321 takes two minutes less, since this means when you do the replacement you will need a new slot at either the departure or the destination (i.e. either the slot 17:35 - 17:39 @ XXX or the slot 20:20 - 20:24 @ PEK).

Obviously the same can be done for props: deploy a set of AN140s to be replaced later with AT7s...

This way you can plan for future growth while ensuring your needed slots in advance at airports bound to become busy... and also (to get back on topic) avoid the slot-taxing system for small planes that you propose :)

3

I wondered about that earlier when I read the idea. People don't slot block just to slot block. They are more than likely planning on swapping out the planes using the system described above, or something very similar.

4

The idea here with the suggestion is that unless someone can afford to replace all their blocking aircraft with bigger ones fairly quickly they will start losing money bigtime.

That should stop most major exploits and also provide a more dynamic game since profits will be higher at smaller and less used airports.

5

It's easy to describe why Slots are usually all gone. Think of it. Slots will only be occupied when there is enough demand that is filling the plane utilizing that slot. There lies the problem. The overall passenger demand is elevated well above realistic levels, while at the same time the Slot calculation per Airport ist tried to be made as realistic as possible.

You cannot oversize demand and not do the same with Slots. It cannot work. Plain and simple. "Sobelair" said it in another thread. Even at ultra low AGEX levels he had an SLF of well above 80% @ PEK.....says it all. 

6

It's easy to describe why Slots are usually all gone. Think of it. Slots will only be occupied when there is enough demand that is filling the plane utilizing that slot. There lies the problem. The overall passenger demand is elevated well above realistic levels, while the Slot calculation per Airport ist tried to be made as realistic as possible.

You cannot oversize demand and not do the same with Slots. It cannot work. Plain and simple. "Sobelair" said it in another thread. Even at ultra low AGEX levels he had an SLF of well above 80% @ PEK.....says it all. 

No demand is not the problem...

Of-course the demand feels like it's too high right now if it's still profitable to fly masses of Props, Regional jets or small narrowbodies to the largest airports!

Try replacing them all with big narrowbodies, widebodies or jumbojets that can take 2-4 times as much passengers each meaning the supply of seats to book is 2-4 times higher and I am certain we will soon complain that there is far to little demand instead ;)

Demand being a problem is only an illusion due to it being profitable to fill all the slots with smaller lower capacity aircraft.

Look at Aspern. Beijing, Heathrow and many other major airports now have 100% slots filled, but how many Airbus 380s do you see in traffic?

7

No demand is not the problem...

Of-course the demand feels like it's too high right now if it's still profitable to fly masses of Props, Regional jets or small narrowbodies to the largest airports!

Try replacing them all with big narrowbodies, widebodies or jumbojets that can take 2-4 times as much passengers each meaning the supply of seats to book is 2-4 times higher and I am certain we will soon complain that there is far to little demand instead ;)

Demand being a problem is only an illusion due to it being profitable to fill all the slots with smaller lower capacity aircraft.

I never use any small planes (except for their intended purpose). Of course on Aspern it's all maxed out right now but my Airline I had on a matured server was running @95% SLF and consisted of only 737-300/400 and 777 with good competition on most of the routes. The 777 were fully booked 2-3 days in advance on flights between STN and YYZ. I was based in Europe with no IL partners at all except for one @ YYZ. With the right schedule you dont need a single IL partner.

Look around at Airlines with fleets exceeding 3000 planes, most of them having 737-900ER/A321 and sometimes fly routes 40x daily or more with these planes. I say there is big issue with demand.

EDIT: They should really introduce the Aspern landing fees on older servers. Should free up Slots with all the Dash8/CRJ700 between large airports

8

737-300/400 is not such a big airplane for connecting major airports.

But landing fees can be tweaked so that even that is not very profitable or competitive for say flights LHR-FRA or such.

9

737-300/400 is not such a big airplane for connecting major airports.

*Sigh*   -_-   You miss my point. Tedious to talk about a liquidated airline and what airports I served with what plane.

10

An you missed my point.

In reality major airports even those that are at maximum runway capacity have a dynamic market for slots and for costs that ensure a small airplane with minimal revenue never can block a slot if someone wants to fly a superjumbo ( A380 / 747 ) instead for massive revenue.

The small amounts of widebodies in operation in general in airlinesim is an excellent proof that it's far too cheap to reserve a slot, all you need to do is be there first and it's yours forever!

If realistic amounts of widebodies was flown in airlinesim we could come back and talk about the demand situation, until then no one can say if the demand is realistic or not. Me neither actually.

As far as I understand in reality the “slots” or amount of slots are auctioned out to the highest bidder = biggest airplane.

A dynamic value to control / emulate this by making slots very expensive on 100% full airports can give us the same result.

So back to the suggestion instead of hijacking the thread with a discussion about demand perhaps?

What do you think about a game mechanic where you have to pay so much for slots at the busiest airports that wide-bodies are the only really profitable choice?

11

No Hijacking intended. For me there's a link between those 2 ressources. 

What do you think about a game mechanic where you have to pay so much for slots at the busiest airports that wide-bodies are the only really profitable choice?

I agree, there has to be found a way of keeping away small planes esepcially between big airports. Problem is, higher landing fees are only introduced on Aspern where competition has not really kicked in yet. However, it still is too profitable to fly with E195 (apparently a popular model within the comunity) between two mega airports.

One other problem remains. People configure their planes with luxury seats resulting in less PAX / Slot. People could use A321 with only 100 seats and we have the same issue. Not only should Airlines be charged with landing fees depending on plane size but also be charged with passenger fees. Perhaps passenger fees could be scaled or discounted. A plane transporting under 50 PAX pays a lot more PAX fees per seat compared to an A321 with 220 seats (additionally to landing fees of course).

12

What do you think about a game mechanic where you have to pay so much for slots at the busiest airports that wide-bodies are the only really profitable choice?

I think you'd find a lot of people leaving AS.

If you were to make it so only wide bodied planes could use large airports, you'd end up with 1200 airlines/holdings still using Dash8s and such to run between four and five bar airports, maybe six and seven, to get enough money for these slots. They would all get these aircraft because Dash8s have some of the best time-to-passenger-to-cost ratio in the game. It would take longer to get the wide-bodied planes because players only get $10 million to start with. Will players use that ten million to maybe get two wide bodied planes and fly maybe 50 flights a week, or will they get nine Dash8s or whatever and run them 360 times a week and use the high demand to create a lot of money, because, well, they can't use O'Hare or Heathrow or something because it's not worth it. So you get an airline running 20-30 Dash8s pretty quick because it's about AS$.

And that wouldn't stop slot blocking. People would still use their Dash8s to block slots until they can get the wide bodies. I don't think it'd work the way it's intended.

13
...

0 - 50% slots taken the fee will gradually go down to a minimum of say 25% normal price to promote any airlines flying any kind of airplane (even small ones) to traffic the airport.

50 - 90% slots taken the fee will gradually go back to the standard fee.

90 - 100% slots taken and the fee will gradually increase up to 400% of normal price (or even higher) to force any airlines flying smaller airplanes away and stop them from blocking the busy runways.

...

Hi,

my airline operates 220 airplanes out of Peking:

20 wide bodies

130 739's and 73J's

50 73G's and 73W's

20 An148 and An158's.

I would like to operate more wide bodies, but by the time I had enough money to lease/buy wide bodies, the airport was running out of slots. Apart from that, it seems to me my fleet is balanced. And my Peking fleet "blocks" about 30% of the slots.

Are you suggesting to increase landing fees regardless of the size of plane ? That would make it very expensive to operate a hub in Peking, or any major airport where all the slots are used. If you want to avoid slot blocking, it would be better to fine tune the system that puts a relatively bigger cost on small planes.

In the Tempelhof game world, nobody is "blocking" slots in Peking, New York, Frankfurt or London. Yet all the slots are taken. But that is because airlines keep expanding as long as passengers keep buying tickets. If there were less passengers, there would be slots available. Using all the slots would result in flying half empty planes  ;-)

Jan

14

Are you suggesting to increase landing fees regardless of the size of plane ? That would make it very expensive to operate a hub in Peking, or any major airport where all the slots are used. If you want to avoid slot blocking, it would be better to fine tune the system that puts a relatively bigger cost on small planes.

There is such a system in place already on Aspern that puts a relatively bigger cost on smaller planes. It's called landing fees ;)

Current values for example for LHR - FRA flight:

A380:    3190 AS$ / 850 seats = 3.7 AS$ per seat

A321:    2600 AS$ / 220 seats = 11.8 AS$ per seat

A319:    2400 AS$ / 132 seats = 18.2 AS$ per seat

Dash8:   2230 AS$ / 80 seats = 27.9 AS$ per seat

Even if increased 4 times wide-bodies would see very little decreased profitability because how it scales above, and partially because they fly much longer connections where you get many times as much income per landing / flight. It also scales with bigger luxury seats perfectly since with 5 times as big seats you pay 5 times landing fee per seat!

And regarding it being expensive to operate a hub in a mega airport. Don't you think it's a good balance idea that it should be less profitable to operate a hub in a place where everyone else also is operating their hub? I think it would be great for balance to promote spreading airlines around better also alleviating slot problems.

My point is that this system is self balancing, the same moment everyone leaves PEK because slots / landing fees are to expensive they will start to drop in price so that it gets more interesting and profitable again.

I'm also not trying to say that it should only be possible to operate wide-bodies out of the mega airports, just that it should be the most profitable airplane like in reality, and I think this suggestion is one way to help promote realistic behavior.

15

The savings in everything-but-the-fuel variable costs that you would see between a 737-900ER or 321 and any widebody would be greatly outshadowed by the difference in fuel costs between the two. Likewise, but to a lesser extent, for the jump from a turboprop/regional to a 737 or 32X. Not to mention, the difference in arrival times due to airspeed differences makes finding the necessary slot pairs difficult to the point where a player will likely just continue running their smaller aircraft.

16

The savings in everything-but-the-fuel variable costs that you would see between a 737-900ER or 321 and any widebody would be greatly outshadowed by the difference in fuel costs between the two. Likewise, but to a lesser extent, for the jump from a turboprop/regional to a 737 or 32X. Not to mention, the difference in arrival times due to airspeed differences makes finding the necessary slot pairs difficult to the point where a player will likely just continue running their smaller aircraft.

The turnaround time should be mentioned alongside the airspeed too.

I run 28 daily flights from my hub CLT to JFK and 47 daily to ATL - I am more than happy, nay, I would love to switch these flights from a 739 to my 788s to free up some slots for me to expand to new destinations, but I can't because the turnaround of the 739 and 788 is different and I can't get a reasonable slot for the change. Same goes for a subsidiary that I acquired some time ago. It runs some shuttle flights between PHL/EWR/JFK/IAD with Dashes, now I would love to switch those flights to at least a 737 but I can't...so I'd have to stick with the DH4s however much I want to get rid of all the turboprops.

17

If there were less passengers, there would be slots available. Using all the slots would result in flying half empty planes  ;-)

Jan

There it is  :D

18

That it's hard to switch slots and upgrade a connection to a bigger airplane is a problem indeed, but a separate issue.

If flights are made unprofitable either the airline has to cancel them or go bankrupt. In both cases if they can't fix a connection someone else will use the slot with a bigger plane that is profitable so the slots will see better usage from the Airports perspective.

19

There it is  :D

Maybe not, they might just switch their 8056 daily flights to LETs then.

Since I started, I’ve come to realize that once a slot is taken by someone, the only hope I have of getting it is if the original player leaves the game. I don’t believe that will change without a major overhaul of the policies and the programming and creating incentives for people to embrace the change.

Frankly, I’d love to see a server where the airports had half the slots but only departures took up a slot. It would eliminate the problem of slot juggling when increasing capacity on a route, but probably has some drawback that I can’t think of right now. Sure, it may end up being that NRT has 1700 arrivals right at 0600 Tokyo time, but you’d just have planes idling on the ground while they waited for one of the 4.5 departure slots every five minutes (compared to the 9 departure or arrival slots as currently exists). I’d also love to see service fees be directly proportional to the percentage of slots that an individual player consumes at an airport instead of by plane size.

Unfortunately, doing so would mean starting over from scratch, keeping naught but the AirlineSim name. It may work for a new server, but there would be too many conflicts to implement on an existing one, since we can’t force people to change their schedules, only provide incentive for them to do it on their own. (Bonus points if you can make them think it was their own idea.) Heck, we’ve still got people operating old seating configurations.

20

There is such a system in place already on Aspern that puts a relatively bigger cost on smaller planes. It's called landing fees ;)

Hi Alex,

is condescending the right word for your remark ? I know we pay landing fees. I have suggested/supported the idea of increased landing fees for smaller planes for years. And I know it has finally been implemented on the Aspern game world. That is why I said "If you want to avoid slot blocking, it would be better to fine tune the system that puts a relatively bigger cost on small planes."

I don't know if there is still any slot blocking going on on Aspern. If there still is, fine tune the current system.

And as far as I am concerned, AS can implement the new landing fees on Tempelhof any day.

And regarding it being expensive to operate a hub in a mega airport. Don't you think it's a good balance idea that it should be less profitable to operate a hub in a place where everyone else also is operating their hub? I think it would be great for balance to promote spreading airlines around better also alleviating slot problems.

I am not against it. I just wanted to make sure I understood you correctly.

But I don't know if it would be a good idea. My airline is pretty profitable. If another airline leaves Peking, I shall fill the gap. In the end, the slots will be filled anyway.

If you make the game more difficult, you make the game easier for experienced players. Remember, you don't need to run faster than the bear... you only need to run faster than the other guy  ;-)

I agree there should be more wide bodies in the game. But in reality you also see a lot of 737's on the tarmac of major airports. Anyway, if you want me to use wide bodies instead of 739's, make it possible to replace them. And make the wide bodies slightly more profitable, or the narrow bodies slightly less profitable. Lower profits and longer turnover times are not an incentive to use wide bodies on short routes.

Jan