This applies especially to the IL airlines - considering you can get the aircraft with a 40K security deposit, but will have to pay up to 300K for seating and crew training.
How long is it acceptable to schedule flights in an unconfigured and/or uncrewed aircraft before activating the flight plan?
This is not a specific complaint, it is reasonable to allow people some time between scheduling and activation. I would say a few days at most. But I assume airlines that have 20-50 aircraft that they don’t have the money to configure for some time, shouldn’t be holding slots.
they changed that with the update regarding speed overwrites and the ability to have invalid flight plans, did they not? or has that only been introduced to some game worlds?
In my opinion it seems to be unnecessary and inappropriate to give a specific time or time span, especially not counted in hours for a game that lasts for years (at least at most servers). Why? Because there are a lot of different situations affected by this, starting with a guy who just has forgot to activate a flight plan up to a cheater who uses hundreds of cheap planes to block slots. On the other hand, we have rules clear enough to separate illegal actions from legal actions.
For this concrete example, if someone has not enough money to equip his passenger planes with cabins, he should take any action to either get the money immediatly or clear his flight plans and the slots immediatly. Otherwise it should be considered cheating without any waiting time (because contacting him and waiting for his response will give him enough time). But that’s just my opinion, of course.
One more thing. It is a known bug that flights disappear from ORS when they are removed from schedule. It is therefore tolerated (as per my communication with support) to have a locked flight/schedule for up to 72 hours until the last flight already booked into the ORS is flown. Then, the flight must be removed from the schedule.
I still think it was mentioned in a dev log or video to be different. Maybe I'll find the time later to go and look for it. clearly, I got something wrong there.
Also, feel free to report airlines that are blocking slots with planes that aren't ready for flying yet. Of course, a small number of planes (let's say 2-3) or small time frame before the flight plan gets activated (let's say 24h) won't be critical. We have to allow everyone a certain degree of freedom for planning (some) flights in advance - I wouldn't consider that slot blocking. However, if there's a dozen of unscheduled planes in a fleet and with locked flights plans (and maybe even with flight schedules that wouldn't actually work when activated and therefore clearly show the motivation toblock slots), it becomes a case of slot blocking. Depending on the situation, cases have been punished heavily in the past.
there are many valid reasons to not activate a flight plan (and holdig slots by that - i would not say "block")
for instance: you want to start to fly from an airport. unfortunately you are in a world/country with a super-aggressive player and you know as soon as you activate your flights, this player will notice it and work actually day and night (i mean this literally) in order to occupy/close all slots at this airport (in my view this IS slot-blocking, although allowed). therefore you try to sneak in and assign many flight plans but do not activate them as it is less likely that you will be noticed by the super-aggressive player. when finished you activate all flights at once.
for instance practical reasons: when i schedule flight plans then i have to adjust prices. but i dont adjust prices after every single flight plan. i adjust all prices at once at the end. after adjusting prices i activate all new flight plans. but often i am interrupted and have to proceed another day. sometimes i even forget that i still have to activate these fpls.
when i start a new airline then usually i will first do the fpls for all aircrafts before i activate them all at once. but this is a process that can take days or sometimes even a bit longer.