Building terminals in AS don’t serve much purpose, and in many worlds slots are an issue, so lets try to solve both problems at once! Recently I saw a post for a Competition regulator(Competition regulator ) and it is an amazing idea. His idea is that you can only use a maximum percentage of slots daily, for example 25 %, and after that you may not get access to more slots. It aims to make it easier for new airlines to come into markets, and create more competition. The problem with this is I don’t think this will work everywhere in the world. Lets take a look in Australia. There aren’t many Airlines who start in Australia, so this would negatively effect the Airports as airlines and alliances will struggle to function properly here if they can’t use the slots.
How does this relate to terminals? Well, what if adding terminals can create new slots. These slots will cost extra and the more you have, the more expensive it is. You must build a terminal after reaching the maximum amount of daily slots or you can not create new routes, that way you can help keep slot usage down while increasing competition. More slots aren’t the only benefit you get, as you get access to reduce transfer times as well as an increase to the maximum transfer time. People you choose can use these perks, making IL’s and alliances valuable. To avoid monopolies, you can only get a maximum amount of slots per hour (for example 6), and each new slot is more expensive then the last.
Why should this be added? In many game worlds, slots are a major issue and it discourages people from creating new routes, making airlines and joining worlds. It benefits those who are large without disadvantaging those that are new.
Compared to a hard slot limit it allows airlines to continue to expand (at a cost), but keeps slots free for new entrants to the market.
Some sort of same-terminal transfer time reduction would also add an interesting game mechanic.
From a realism perspective, I’m sure anyone that travels often has had the experience of landing at your destination airport but being unable to disembark because there are no gates free. I’m sure lack of gates is as big an issue at some airports as lack of slots is at others.
Having some slot limit or additional cost might be good, but I don’t think it is fixing the core issue. The issue I believe we have is route frequency. Most airlines, including myself, will have ridiculous trunk route frequency, which takes up a lot of slots. And they have nothing to do with transfer pax. I think you will get the slots open up a lot if that’s limited. The slot limit and added cost won’t fix the issue because the widebodies turnaround time is unfairly slow for short routes: I use 747s and 380s on my domestic one-hour short routes, and it takes them 2 hours to turn around! I’m not sure how much better did the dynamic turnaround bring, but at least what I get right now makes no sense. ANA and JAL used to fly routes like this with 74D, and the turnaround time is more like an hour. Applying only slot restrictions or cost creates an unrealistic roadblock for airline growth, which I think will end up in an overregulated market than in real life.
Personally, I think the true solution is to fix the widebodies on short routes and route frequency restrictions, and maybe add on the slot restriction or cost.
I definitely want to improve terminals at some point down the line, fixing several design issues with the current implementation:
unrealistic amounts of lots of tiny terminals (players building individual terminals for a handful of flights)
silly definition of capacity limits. In reality, I am sure an airline doesn’t book for “2000 pax” and the moment they haul 2001 pax, everything breaks down. Instead, all of this is much more dynamic: imo it would make more sense to book gate time, with different general sizes of gates, and when the overall capacity of a gate/terminal is exceeded, things start to slow down somehow (leading to delays or an image penalty, for example)
terminals in reality are huge projects and only rarely an airline is the direct operator of one (although airports will of course build terminals for a particular large client). I’d love to make them more meaningful in AS as well, something a large airline can (must) sink a lot of money into and that can’t be done overnight.
the quality attributes of current terminals in AS are a bit “meh”. Would love to have a bit more detail here in terms of tangible (transfer time, capacity, airline lounges, …) and intangible (amenities, architecture, …) attributes here.
All that said, terminals shouldn’t and likely won’t affect slots as we have them today, as those are a capacity limit of the airport itself (how many planes can land, take-off and taxi in a given amount of time), so I doubt we’ll make that dynamic anytime soon. Rather, terminals might introduce a second type of slot (“gate available”). Which doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t come up with new rules for how sots are allocated. But that’s a completely different topic.
This is spot on and definitely something that’s going to get addressed in one way or another eventually.
I think adding in gate classes or use the would be interesting.For instance in AS a CRJ uses the same “gate” as a A380. In real life a CRJ could technically use an A380 gate if needed but not the other way around.
So outside of landing slots there could be gate slots. This would directly add a benefit to terminals as now you can add more gates. Gates could have different sizes like in real life. ICAO has gates sizes, also called Design Codes, going A - F with F being the largest. Going off of a Boeing chart a 737 is a code C while a 757 and 767 is a code D, the 747-400 is code E, and the 747-8 is a code F.
The other way to do it that is a littler simpler is make the gates Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large.
For a real life example UA’s hub at ORD. UA terminal C has code D and code E gates. While UA has transitioned to mostly 787 flying for their International routes they still use the 767 because there are a few gates that can’t be upgraded to code E. In AS if airlines A only has 1 class E gate then they might have to either go with a smaller airframe or they will have to weigh to the cost v benefit or the routes they have and the route they want to add.
If you want some complexity on gates, in real life, it’s also common to split a large widebody gate into two smaller narrowbodies gates, so you get one widebody slot or two narrowbodies slots. Like at RJAA, spots 67 and 68 can become 67 L/R and 68 L/R (two jetbridges split between each spot); spots 155 and 154 can be used together as spot 76.
This is going to be quite some work, though, but i guess if you are going to get the gate/ramp size, you probably get these info already.
Not sure whether we could afford to go up to that level of detail when allocating flights to gates…because this would mean that once 67L is busy, 67 can’t be used anymore, but 67R could. Which would mean we can’t just keep a tally of how many gates of “code X” are busy at any given point in time, but we’d have to do assignments to specific gates
Actually, I don’t think it’s the airline’s job to assign specific gates for the scheduling in the first place; it’s more like the airport’s job. I think you requested slot and plane size and the airport made the final decision if I understand how it works correctly. I know Japanese airport literally publish the airline slot requests and their final slot allocation on the website (and obviously, airlines never get exactly what they want). I think the main question would be if you consider the gate in general to be a widebody or narrowbody spot if a ramp or gate size is considered.
I actually don’t think the ramp and gate size should be part of the slot in the first place. AS has more demand than real life, which means by design, players should use larger planes than real life, so using real gate size isn’t that appropriate. Also, airport will upgrade or downgrade gate based on actual airline usage, so the limitation is really the total ramp space, not the exact size of the gate, but this would become micro-management of the airport, which I assume is not the purpose of AS
edit: i think what could be useful is for player-built terminal only, you can choose to have more jetbridge compared to the default airport terminal. And for planes that can use more than 1 jetbridge, the boarding time speeds up if you have more than 1 jetbridge. If you build a gate with two jetbridges, it makes no difference to an A320 compared to 1, but it makes an A350 boarding faster. And if you build 3 bridges, then the only one that will get advantages would be an A380 (I don’t think I ever saw a 747 use two bridges at the front plus an over-wing jet bridge at the rear, which EHAM used to have).
Don’t get me wrong, I was speaking exclusively about how AirlineSim has to handle it (possibly/likely) behind the scenes. It obviously isn’t realistic for this to be micromanaged by players.
Not sure how these things relate. You can still have gate sizes in a world that has more demand. They gates just might be a tad bigger on average
An aspect we haven’t really touched on here yet: Bus gates and remote stands. Definitely important if we want to model this aspect. But concerning your statement that this is micro-management of the airport: Totally agree and that’s why - if we ever decide to take a stab at this - clear lines need to be drawn as to what makes sense for players to influence and what doesn’t. I think a fairly high-level abstraction will be fine. Not as coarse/simplified as it is today, but still simple enough to not end up in micromanagement and complex enough to actually be meaningful.
