When digging through the nice game, I find one feature missing from the game that would be incredibly useful in planning ahead: preparing flight plan.
For various reasons, it could be frequent to prepare a flight plan for an aircraft not yet in the fleet. Either because you are currently bidding on it in the aircraft market, because you are planning ahead for future routes, or because you are planning to upgrade later for a bigger aircraft with different speed / turnaround time characteristics.
In the current version, there is absolutely no way to prepare a flight plan without associating an aircraft to it, which means that you have to wait for an aircraft of the targeted type to be available before being able to build a flight plan for it.
What I can imagine is a feature similar to the cabin configurations, which allows to create a flight plan for any aircraft, without associating it with any actual aircraft.
Similarly, a flight plan associated with an aircraft could be "stored" instead of being completely lost, to be later associated with another aircraft – which could also happen when an aircraft is removed from the fleet (lease terminated, aircraft put on market). This would obviate the burden of recreating the same flight plan over and over when switching from aircraft A to aircraft B without overlap in leases for example.
Of course, to avoid any cheating, airport slots would not be blocked until the schedule is associated with an aircraft, and activated.
I understand that this could be challenging to implement on the technical side because of the data model changes. However, this is easily one of the features I am missing most in Airlinesim today.
Forgive me if I'm repeating something else I read when absorbing 6-9 months of past forum activity, but it seems related to the idea of being more easily able to construct a few one-day schedules that are assigned to different aircraft on different days of the week. For example, I built two flight plans, one that only had a ~90% maintenance ratio and another that was ~120%. Sharing these flight plans across two aircraft made it possible for both aircraft to have maintenance ratios above 100%, but it was not easy to enter (and the flights showed up multiple times in the schedules).
Maybe the "preset" flight plans could be at the granularity of one 24-hour period and then easily assigned to different aircraft on different days of the week.
Well, if you can create a flight plan before you get the aircraft it could be called as slot blobking metod, why? well for you to create a valid flight plan you have to have free slots, once you created the flight plan even if it is not activated the slot you used is no longer free for another players, and example I have 150 ordered AC it will take like 2 months to deliver If it was possible I could create the 150 flight plans block all slots I need and competitor wouldn't stand a chance on reacting on my hub.
I think this is why you need the aircraft to create the FP, to ensure you use it and not just block slots.
I think that TO wanted to say that he would like to see a kind of a template to prepare the flightplan. But without having the available slots in mind and blocking them, this most likely will not be possible to avoid what is named with the AS word 2016, slot blocking.
I would also like to see the possibility to prepare the flightplan in f.e. Excel and import this data then into the game but this will not really help as a flightplan in AS does only work with a specific plane type and the slots.
I don;t know why so fuzz about any slots, OP clearly stated "Of course, to avoid any cheating, airport slots would not be blocked until the schedule is associated with an aircraft, and activated."
IMO, this flight plan pre-planning is a great idea. You do it, but knowing the risks, that the slots might no longer be available when you apply the flight plan to the aircraft. That's what the OP said.
I like this idea. The current thing I do is delete one of my current flight plan when the aircraft is in the air, test the new plan, delete the new plan and put the old back and reactivate. It's really not efficient.
My solution is creating some void aircrafts for testing. These aircraft will have a certain type but will not occupy real slots. When a real aircraft is delivered, the flight plan can be transferred to the real aircraft.