New connecting flight rule results?

Quimby was the first world where the new connecting flight rule was introduced and tested.

What are the results so far? Is it having the desired effect? Does it look like it’s something that will be pursued further, or is it not doing much and will likely be scrapped?

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Also could someone explain the new rule and what it exactly means? I haven’t fully grasped it.

I guess there’s not much to report.

I operated an airline on Quimby for two months, based out of SFO, flying the A300-600, the 747-400, and all 737 types. Versus other servers, it’s much harder to fill your aircraft up since you can’t stack multiple flights from one city onto your connecting flight. It was much harder for me to build a hub past 1800 departures, since the city pairings you could fly to (that aren’t affected by the connecting rule) start decreasing as you add more flights.

I see how this rule makes it more realistic, but I’d rather my planes be full!

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I’ve been thinking about this new rule, and I see one major drawback: in case of some routes, more than one flight to a destination by one carrier should be considered. Why?

As an example, let’s talk about the beloved Sint Maarten SXM airport. Let’s say you operate a flight from Amsterdam using a widebody, and then wish to transfer your passengers to regional airports around SXM (for example SBH or SAB).
The thing is, many of those airports have very short runways, therefore the largest planes operating there have up to 19 seats. Theoretically speaking, lets say there is a demand of 40 passengers between AMS and SAB. After your plane arrives at SXM, not all of those 40 pax can transfer onto your own flights to SAB, because the number of connecting flights considered is artificially capped at one.

The rule is reasonable in some cases, but examples like this make me think that it should be discontinued in future gameworlds.

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Have you observed this to be an actual issue or is it a supposed one? Because I doubt there’s a daily demand of 40 pax between AMS and SAB :wink:

It’s a supposed one, I’m just raising an issue that I believe may exist with some combination of airports (not necessarily between AMS and SAB).

Couldn’t you just have 2 flights shortly departing after each other as the second flight should become active when the first one is completely booked?

I would say it’s generally a non-issue, not only for AMS-SAB. Your parameters are:

  1. Airport so small that it only allows operating a 19-seater
  2. You expect to capture the full market for that particular point-2-point, so no competition

These two things will only ever happen at very small airports where you won’t see the sort of P2P demand that exceeds a 19-seater. And even if it did: Since there is no or very little competition, pax would happily book the next day’s flight (assuming a daily connection).

Is this new rule doing what you hoped it would do for the game?

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The jury is still out on this one :smiley:

Generally speaking, I would say it does. But due to the fact that it’s really hard to compare game worlds among each other, it’s hard to judge. When we ran the very first experiment based on existing data from Idlewild, some users reported a drop in load, which in such a mature game world probably is a good thing. But at the same time, we have received little to no feedback in regular game worlds that have the feature enabled, neither positive nor negative. So either way, the effect doesn’t seem to be massive.

So this was what the Drewitz experiment was about?

Only as a secondary objective. It was primarily about operational changes.

For the connecting flight rule:
If you have JFK-DFW and MIA-DFW connecting with two flights from DFW-LAX (5 min apart), shouldn’t the both be filled if there is enough demand from MIA-LAX and JFK-LAX? Or if the algorithm selects the same DFW-LAX flight, the other flight will not have any transfers?

Could the 2nd flight be listed if the 1st option gets filled (and only then)?

So if that DFW-LAX flight is filled on Day 1, then for Day 2/3 the second DFW-LAX is listed as the connecting flight for MIA/JFK.

I’m trying to figure out if my scenario is possible or if one of the flights will be completely full and the other will be void of transfers.

Or maybe I don’t fully understand the rule since it looks like the YYZ-OMA flight can connect with either OMA-PDX flight.