Airport busy times - Real Traffic

[Aeraxon]

Hi all,

I noticed that when I start San Diego in the morning (around 5AM) I have a lot of takeoffs. That was a lot of fun to manage. Now I would like to have a lot of landings. Has anyone noticed other times where the chance of a busy time is high? On San Diego or on other airports.

In my actual game I have started San Diego at 3PM but after a view takeoffs the airport is nearly empty (there are 3 airplanes on the terminals left right now) but noone lands, it is just happening nothing. I had the game on 16x speed for several (real time) minutes and nothing happened. So the airport had around an hour with no takeoffs or landings.

[Neuro Divergent]

What I do is go into the data files, open the schedule text file in notepad and save as a .csv and then reopen in excel. The flights are grouped as arrivals and departures so you can split them into two files (I use 2 tabs in excel, just cut/paste all of one group to the other tab) .. then sort by either departure time (for departures, duh) or arrival time. Makes it easy to glance at all the flights and see the groupings. I just did this with KLAX and found from 0700 - 0800 there are 41 departures and 46 arrivals. THAT should be fun! Lol

In terms of operations in general, I've worked at 2 airports and can say from experience that departures tend to be more, "grouped" than arrivals. We used to experience, "fleet launch" in the morning when all the originators would depart and then there was a lul until arrivals started coming in. There were blocks when groups of flights would come in but for the most part, arrivals tended to be more steady. Later in the evening, there would be less departures and a more constant stream of arrivals but nothing like the, "exodus" in the am. :) Might be different depending on the airport though, just what I've seen.

[Aeraxon]

Hey, Thank you for that answer. I just have one related question. Can you tell me what colum is for what? I guess that the first is for departure, the secon for arrival, but I have two with times in it however one is often the same, so I guess that the other will be the arrival time, but I am not sure. Have you figured out all the meanings?


My Guesses:
LAS - SAN - 733 - WN - 1993 - 00:05 - 12:00 - 1 - WN
from - to - plane - Airline - ?? - arrival - ?? - ?? - Airline again???



Is that right?

[Neuro Divergent]

Ok, I just ran threw KSAN in real traffic and here's what I came up with for arrivals:

From 00:00 - 04:00 just 3 arrivals, 0400-0500 - 1.
0500-0600 3
0600 4
0700 7
0800 12
0900 15
1000 17
1100 16
1200 17
1300 8
1400 15
1500 13
1600 8
1700 20
1800 10
1900 13
2000 15
2100 12
2200 14
2300 - 0000 11

So busiest arrival time at KSAN seems to be from 1700 - 1800 with 20 arrivals

[Aeraxon]

And it also doesn't seems to be acurate. I have just took a look inside. there should take of a Federal Express Plane in a view minutes but there is no FedEx plane on the Airport so how should that work?

[Aeraxon]

I just went through the time between 1700 and 1800 and had exactly 0 arrivals. Do you use real traffic? (edit: just saw you mentioned real traffic.)

by the way: is english your prefered language? I could offer german ;-) but english works totally fine for me.

[Neuro Divergent]

Yeah the 12:00 is just a placeholder, I believe .. as that's supposed to be the duration of the flight but it's ignored? (Or I could be thinking of traffic tools from FS) Or maybe it's the departure time but since it really doesn't matter, it's just 12:00? Anyway ..

Headings from left to right:

Origin/Departure (flip depending on where KSAN is), Equipment, Airline IATA, Flight #, Departure/Arrival time (depends on arrival or departure), I don't know what the 1 is for and then it's just the IATA again.

So anyway, if you have say, "KLAX KSAN" then it's an arrival and the time will be the arrival time. If it's reversed, it will be the departure time.

And I was in error .. the KSAN schedule isn't split evenly into departures and arrivals but it's easy enough to sort with excel.

[Aeraxon]

If I compare the schedule flight plan to what I see ingame, I guess there is going something wrong or there is some other mechanic that has an impact on arrivals

[Neuro Divergent]

Well I'm not sure if these times are local or UTC. I know Tower2011 used UTC time so you had to figure that in. What I do is pick a start time and see what flight comes up first, then check the list to see where it is and check the time. That will help you synchronize.

And yes English is my native language. I could sprecken some deutsch but I would butcher it. :p

[Neuro Divergent]

Also .. something I noticed in 2011 that may have carried over. Sometimes there will be several flights stacked at the same exact time in the schedule. If that happens, sometimes not all those planes will "spawn" because they can't fit in the same slot at the same time. Sometimes they will be fit into the flow late .. othertimes they may not show at all. And in the case of FDX .. the terminal file doesn't even have assigned parking for cargo carriers so it probably didn't spawn because it has no place to go. Just need to add "FDX" to one of the "terminals" for cargo and it SHOULD be there.

[Aeraxon]

I will now try to find a flight for sync and give you feedback

[Aeraxon]

so, the next departure I got was:

UAL736 from SAN to SFO. It popped up ingame around 19:41 and in the schedule is:

SAN - SFO - 73H - UA - 736 - 12:00 - 19:41 - 1 - UA

So that looks like it is the local time. But that means that there is something wron with the arrivals, right?

Ingame I had to wait half an hour and during that time there should be 7 arrivals. But noone arrived.

[Aeraxon]

or am I in the wrong folder? I am looking into Tower 3d Pro/Extensions/Airfields

[Neuro Divergent]

I've seen things in 2011 where planes in the schedule did not appear. Sometimes it was because they were too bunched together and 1 or 2 wouldn't "fit" so they were delayed or canceled altogether. It could also be that the terminal doesn't have a dedicated area for them. (Airfields/KSAN/ksan_terminal.txt) The airline's ICAO code needs to be in there somewhere or the sim reads it has having no gates so the aircraft will not spawn. Could also be a conflict with the airline codes. I know with KLAX there are several airlines in the schedule that are NOT in the airlines.txt file so those would not appear. (Correction: I haven't confirmed that yet .. there are airline codes in the TERMINAL file that are not in the airlines.txt but don't know about the schedule)

[Aeraxon]

I have done some testing. For KJFK I added every second hour a departure flight for lufthansa and on the other hours an arrival flight. I have checked, that everyone has a unique flight id and that lufthansa is present in the terminal file. Then I started the game and at 12:00 every departure flight that I have added requested pushback. After I changed the second timestamp (that one where we thought it would have no meaning) it looked ok. I had not enough time for testing, but at 12:00 there was only one departure flight. I will do some testing on the small airport tomorrow as for me it looks like there are much less arrivals than in the schedule file. Everytime I play I get a lot more departures than arrivals. It doesn't matter what airport or time I choose.

tomorrow I will completely rewrite the st. thomas schedule for testing.

You will get my feedback here.

[mjbhgrampy]

The schedule format is as follows:
DepAirport,ArrAirport,Type,Airline,Flight#,ArrivalTime,DepartureTime,Duration,Codeshare

Duration is always 1 and the Codeshare IATA is always the same as the Airline IATA. Local time is used. However, in RT the ArrivalTime for a departure is always 12:00 and for an arrival the DepartureTime is always 12:00.

The following is an example of a Southwest departure at 9:10am from San Diego to Las Vegas.
SAN, LAS, 737, WN, 4266, 12:00, 09:10, 1, WN
The following is an example of a Delta arrival from Atlanta to San Diego at 8:12pm.
ATL, SAN, 739, DL, 1941, 20:12, 12:00, 1, DL

Regarding low traffic at KSAN - I think you may have an issue with your ksan_terminal.txt file. KSAN was updated recently so something may be out of synch.