It’s on my list to allow locking the actual flight time instead of the arrival time. Which, technically, is a “speed override”. So in a sense, we would have come full circle: We had “speed overrides” initially, which should have been “fixed flight duration” to begin with. Then I switched to fixed arrival times to address a particular problem (flight times changing due to changes in the simulation…be it data, performance or whatever). And finally I might switch back to fixed flight duration OR fixed arrival time, depending on use-case.
But before I do that, I’d like to look into another tiny but possibly impactful change that I was made aware of the other day in a completely unrelated topic:
I am referring to the part highlighted in bold. We do in fact have that, albeit as a static duration that’s added to all flights, irrespective of aircraft type, airport size or any other factor. This, imo, explains a lot of the rounding issues that people see in their cruise speeds. With cruise speeds deviating from the default for no apparent reason. I would really like to change this to something that makes more sense. A plane will, generally, fly along the great circle path. And I don’t see us modelling actual airways anytime soon. But additional distance for approach, ascend and descend could and should easily be added. And they should likely depend on the route flown and possibly even the aircraft type. For a Britten-Norman that flies a 15km flight between two island airstrips, the flight profile is likely fairly close to a “straight line” and there is absolutely no point in adding another 30 minutes of flight time.
Now that I actually spell it out…this basically feels like a bug 