General observation

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Still relatively new to this game. Enjoy the challenges and strategies. Been playing about 6 months+
I was in the airlines for some 30 years, so I have a fair knowledge of business practices.

My point i would like to make ( not a complaint) but observation. Welcome your feedback

My carrier is in Canada ( base toronto). start with the usual IDP and establish (slowly ) the hub/banks.feed.

entry into a (US market) i.e ORD from say my base YYZ…is simply impossible.

5% slots left. flight frequency between the two cities is 100+ daily flights (totally unrealistic.) Real world about 10/day
One airline not only dominates (95%) of all traffic…making it near impossible to enter
This scenario can be applied to almost every market outside of Canada. Unless your ready to take a loss on the route and have your outbound cover expenses.

-It would be more equal to apply a limitation on how many slots one carrier can hold in a given market.
Much like the real world where airlines slots are sold/auctioned…but still controlled. Not allowing any one airline to monopolize the city pair. Implementing a control, allows for more competition , pricing and schedules.

-Airline schedules that are only minutes apart, again so very unrealistic. ORD to YYZ i.e leaving at 7:10am (788) and again at 7:11am (788). Again no airlines in realword would schedule two wide bodies within 60 seconds apart. airline holding a slot which is simply unjustified, to others who would like to play in fairness.

While I am not looking for “special treatment” or special conditions over others, I do think the playing field should be
applied equal to all who want to play. I’m surprised you haven’t had more comments about this issue.

no slots (or barely none) in most US and Europe major markets, leaves little room but to stay within your international border.

Anyways my two cents worth of “venting” . I’ve always observed, that unless you get into the game first (and early) you won’t fair well starting later, as the others are miles away from your start point. Gobbling up all the resources.

Perhaps one day, you’ll find a way to place limitations on how enterprises evolve, and limit their control on slots for one,
and schedule discrepancies that are so obvious to the novice viewer.

Cheers!

5 Likes
2

Welcome, Frenchy55!

I wanted to congratulate you on your successful career at the airlines. I am young professional, in the early years of my own career in aviation.

I have only been playing this game for a couple of months now myself. I’ve been thinking about your suggestion for the past couple days before replying. I have my own arguments against each of your points, but I don’t know if that would do any good. It may not be equal for players starting later in the game, but I don’t believe it’s unfair.

Here’s my suggestion:

You have not been the first player to suggest this. I’m sure there are other players who think the same way as you. Perhaps you look into gathering like-minded players and starting a private server? Come up with your own restrictions on the number of slots/airports every airline can hold. Maybe it will fix major issues that is obvious to some viewers?

Or maybe it will limit the competitiveness and strategies available to an airline.

I wish you the best of luck and hope you enjoy this game as much as I do!

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Keeping it competitive, is what makes the game fun. So i am not suggesting you remove that.
As for slots, no single entity should be allow to control more than 50% of the slots. This would assure that all players have an opportunity to compete in a postivie spirit.
Monopolizing a route, by dumping over excess capacity simply defeats the purpose of playing. Placing 20,000 seats a day in a market that only flies 1500 passengers in a day is ridiculous.

The owners of this game, should be looking into all aspects of these points, rather than simply allowing the forums to fix them.
It’s up to Airlinesim, the creator/developers to adjust the parameters of play…so it is fair and all on an equal footing.

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I suppose you are talking about Fornebu.
Those flights are operated by a player whom I know, and the flights are not dumping 20,000 seats on a 1500 seat route, All those flights are FULL my friend.

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Well, that is exactly the problem, my friend. One single airline stacking total of 347 weekly flights with a widebody on a 700 km route and having them all full, it is devoid of any reality!

Scheduling is even more ridiculous.
There is total of 129 weekly flights between 23:52 and 05:29 local time.
Not a single flight between 05:29 and 07:49.
Then 56 weekly flights between 07:49 and 09:20.
Not a single flight between 09:20 and 11:49.
Then 58 weekly flights between 11:49 and 13:40.
Not a single flight between 13:40 and 15:45.
Then 55 weekly flights between 15:45 and 17:25,
but not a single flight between 17:25 and 20:05.
Then 49 weekly flights in a mere hour between 20:05 and 21:09,
and then again not a single flight between 21:09 and 23:52.
All times local.

That’s also very realistic, indeed!

While the frequency itself might not be an issue, such a scheduling and flying a widebody on 700 km route makes no sense at all, and is demotivating, both for the lack of realism and difficulty to enter the play.

This is not an isolated case, there are many examples like that, I noticed them in my game world, and I was surprised when I relaized that 2 AM flights are equally attractive to passengers as rush hour flights, and that regular time spacing between flights does not matter, you can cram them all within 15 minutes, but could not bother to write.

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Limatambo ATL-PIT
Limatambo ATL-PIT738×609 81.6 KB

For example, look at this schedule, ATL-PIT, in Limatambo; 20 daily flights, 7 out of them between 01:15 and 03:50 local time, and it’s not red-eye flight; and not a single flight after 15:30.

Flight ATL-PIT via LOL…

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Glad to see my posting has stirred some dialogue. I guess my point ( I used 20,000 seats to simply ) point out the ridiculous amount of seats in a given market. Wide body B788 , operating schedules withing minutes of separation is simply unrealistc.

Again, I will go back to the points i made earlier. To keep the game world competitive/ realistic and entertaining while at the same time keeping it motivational to those who want to play and compete… there should be parameters of limiting any one carrier holding more than 50% slots in a given city , as well as limiting the max number of flights any one carrier can fly. Any enterprise holding more than the allowed allocation is now monopolizing the game world. It leaves little motivation for someone wanting to play. trying to establish routes is near impossible.

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as a big player (atm switch place 1 and 2 on fornebu) i can say you are right! most flights are full even if i have 100+ Flight numbers (eg. PEK-PVG/SHA) Thats 1400 weekly flights (about 58 weekly per hour) and even with widebody full.

And for the slot problems, it would be nice to expand airports. Like investing in new runway. and i even would like to see more other airlines on my hubs. I play for fun and not to kill other airlines.

@Frenchy55 and there would be demand for everyone, just the slots missing. If you play on fornebu you can hit me up ingame “serphilyt”/“China Speed Shuttle” or over discord “grazer.” and we can see how i can help you to grow ^^

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I’m sure there must be a way with the developer of this game to place a “formula” that would keep tabs on the % percentile that each carrier has in a given city. So every time you add a departure , if it puts you over the 50% threshold…it won;t accept it unless you give up something.
example being … i want to add a new trip beween A & B. Doing so puts my slots being held over the airports slot allocaiton.
If I really want to add services, the consequences is giving up in another market

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You’ve been at it for some 4+ years.
When did you really see actually growth …after how many “months” ?

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It took some months, but as both big carriers left China i had to plan 1000+ Planes in 1 week. Befor that i had around 150 planes

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What do you mean by…" I had to plan 1000+ planes in 1 week ?
I will assume that when you had 150 , the process was much slower, having to save cash before expanding

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Airlines tend to leave a market or reduce service when the other carrier lower’s price and adds services. it places pressure on the # 2 carrier to either match/reduce or leave.
While i’m not looking to" kill" my competition , I’m simply trying to enter a market and take a share of the traffic.

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No i had good amounts of cash every week. after 3-4 months i had 400mio+ savings. The problem was that there are no slots until the 2 big players left. and then i had to get as much planes as fast as possible to get most of the slots (dont remeber theyr names, only one “china International Fly”, thats why i made a airline in that name to remeber the airline that left and made space for me ^^)

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This is how it works in AS …
And said that, the OP has 3 options:
@Frenchy55

  1. play on legacy server and wait your turn (which may take years to happen)
  2. play on temporary server right from the server beginning
  3. play on private server with much less competition and “honor enforced” rules

There are private servers which have honor based rules similar to what you proposed. You can look in the forums under private server conversations.

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@Frenchy55 All the issues you mentioned are well-known and more often than not are rooted in technical limitations and/or “birth defects” of the current generation of AirlineSim.

Take time-sensitive passengers for example: We actively decided against implementing this because it would exacerbate the “first come, first served” issue that is already an issue with slots. Whoever comes first or grows the fastest can hog all the “good slots”, whoever comes second loses out. Especially because the current ORS knows only a single passenger type per class. One of the key things the DS is trying to solve.

Similarly, the way the current-gen ORS distributes traffic means that frequency is key, leading people to create these extremely unrealistic scheduled.

Global demand, while similar to what you’d find in public statistics, is likely too high for how AS (currently) works.

And last but (certainly) not least, interlining and transfers are likely too easy and too cheap as well, meaning sufficiently large airlines can fill the sort of “widebody subway” mentioned above.

There are more aspects to it, and many of those influence each other. As said, the DS wants to address a lot of these issues, which is why it’s one of my key development priorities for the near future.

2 Likes
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The issue of accessing time sensitive ‘good’ slots exists in the real world where there is also a lot of debate about how to fix it

In the case of Sydney, a secondary major airport WSI / YSWS is under construction to spread out the load. Hopefully once implemented, DS will also help the slot situation at large city airports where secondary airports are nearby

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Well i’m glad I raised the issue. Still a novice to this game. I find it entertaining, but equally frustrating when ’ mammoth enterprises dominate and hoard all the resources required to start a carrier. In the end, interested gamers simply leave the simulation and move on. Hoping down the road the creator will focus on some of the major issues raised. Appreciate and understand it’s not an easy task, but still look forward to participating.

1 Like
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I do think it should be far more expensive to expand the bigger you get, right now a large player could open 100 new routes in a day. In real life the amount of money needed to do this would make it almost not worth it.

Opening a new destination , you’re talking Slot costs, Ground crew, hiring staff, marketing, planes, government approval and bi-lateral agreements, gate space rent etc. Opening routes should be a serious consideration of money and resources. For example
If I wanted to open a new route as a large airline

Station opening - $10,000-$100,000 depending on airport size/airline size. 1 time fee
Ground operator contract - $10,000 a week then extra $500 per route after 20 weekly flights
Staff hiring - $20,000
Marketing - $5-10,000
Government/Bi-lateral approval - $20,000
Slots $1-50,000 per week depending on size of airport and airline/aircraft etc
Gate space rent at non domestic airports - $25,000 up front

So for a French airline based at CDG to open a route to LHR it could cost up to $500,000 up front and if you dump hundreds of flights on it, have ongoing costs for that station of about $20,000 a week. Now $500k is peanuts to a bigger airline, but when you open 20 new routes, its not unlimited money.

We also need C and D checks on planes, to keep the older bigger airlines fleets in check.

It just should be far harder to expand quickly. Whether my idea has any balance I dont know, it could make it almost impossible for a new player to compete - but it could be “new airline discount” and smaller airline you are the cheaper everything is.

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Airlines wanting to suddenly grow this much in real world would most primarily be limited by availability of aircraft, airport slot, and manpower. Secondly would be the market demand as they customers aren’t familiar with new airlines. Availability of cash wouldn’t be a problem if you get investors willing to fund things. Implementing these into AS will probably make it more favorable to old airlines who have more money to overcome things.
As for adding maintenance, it’d probably make life harder for new players than old players, since old players have the money to deal with them while new players dont, and it is new players that have to rely on old used aircraft to expand