How do you get Early morning flights?

[Imortalin]

From midnight on? I cant find any airlines that fly at those times? Is it a resaerched tech or something?

[badasscat2000]

It's not in the game yet, but it is planned.

What you can do, though, is schedule one or two late night XL flights, stretch their gate time out a bit and then set their departure time as late as possible. That way you can end up with flights that depart at 4AM, meaning you'll basically never have an empty airport since pax for 6AM flights will start arriving before your last flight leaves.

I personally like having at least a couple of hours of quiet to get my airport cleaned up and stuff maintained.

[FWT]

Agreed. My latest flight depatures at 1:00AM and between 5:00AM and 6:00AM some flights will arrive early (for the 6:00AM slot). So from 1:00AM until until 5:00AM it is my maintenance window.

[andycishere]

Originally posted by badasscat2000:

I personally like having at least a couple of hours of quiet to get my airport cleaned up and stuff maintained.

It's something which should be available later when the airport has reached a specific size OR it should be very expensive to research.
A small airport is often running only during daytime but when you get a huge int. airport then it makes sense to have 24h traffic.

[badasscat2000]

Well, it's technically in the game so I'm sure it's coming (and I'm not really sure why you can't get EAM flights now, or what makes them different than other flights), but I think the solution I mentioned above is actually pretty realistic. I live basically right next to JFK airport in NYC and there really aren't many passenger flights at all between 2-5AM. 5AM, it does suddenly get pretty hectic, but you can do that in SA if you extend the gate time of your latest arrivals, which is the way it's done in real life too.

I'd love to see cargo flights overnight in SA, but passenger flights can pretty much be scheduled realistically as is. It's really rare even at the big airports I'm familiar with to have a passenger flight scheduled to arrive at 3AM and take off at 4:30AM, for example. Sometimes it may happen when it's not supposed to, but usually it's not supposed to.

I wonder if the fact that you can't schedule an actual EAM flight in SA is because those slots are meant to go to cargo. I hope, anyway.

[Scifiwriterguy]

Per the Trello page, EAM-slot flights are in the "Planned-Future" list. So they'll be with us eventually. :)

[Neuro Divergent]

Kinda late to this party but, this also brings up the question of terminating/originating flights. I've worked at 2 airports: one regional and one international and they both had flights that basically, "closed the gate" once they arrived and then stayed overnight (much longer than the 5 hour max turnaround time we currently have). I'd guess that the first thing would be to extend the turnaround time but also, maybe have either a checkbox or something to indicate ,"Terminating Flight?" Or possibly set the, "First Pax arriving" (at the airport) to a specific time prior to scheduled departure. That (I think) would prevent people from showing up at the airport the day before the flight is scheduled to leave. Maybe this is already in place? I haven't track exactly when pax start showing up and if that time is based on the max capacity of the aircraft.

Also, a time to actually,"close" the gate would be nice, maybe a right click option on the gate agent desk? That way if you're just running a smaller, daytime only airport, you won't have airline staff standing around empty gates all night.

[Scifiwriterguy]

Originally posted by CaptainOcdadd:

Also, a time to actually,"close" the gate would be nice, maybe a right click option on the gate agent desk? That way if you're just running a smaller, daytime only airport, you won't have airline staff standing around empty gates all night.

I believe this became possible with the staff scheduling update. :) I haven't had much of a chance to play lately, so I may be mistaken, but I believe GAs are schedulable now.

[Moose]

My impression was always that they're not there yet due to noise being an issue for the local community. I figure when they are put in the game there will be one or more R&D projects needed before they unlock.

[Scifiwriterguy]

If you mean the EAM flights in general, LV said a couple weeks ago that their implementation is effectively ready to go and a (relatively) minor code edit to add them, but doing so had been held up by several bad bugs that needed stomping and the desire to get the current Edge build clean so it can trickle down to the other branches.

That said...

You bring up several great ideas there, Moose. :) EAM flights could be enabled by default or short research project, but limited by size category (and possibly quantity, like how the tower works) until research projects into noise abatement are completed to unlock larger and larger aircraft. That way, starting players can fill out their flight schedules without too much grief, but have incentive to research the "techs" that would enable more profitable use of the time with more and larger aircraft. Really liking all the mileage you've added to it!

[Neuro Divergent]

Noise abatement would be AWESOME! For example, unleashing a firing squad on the local NIMBY population (okay, maybe not that. Lol) But yes, having that in place before being "allowed" any of the more, not so quiet aircraft would be great.

Staff scheduling? Did I miss something? Only thing I've seen related to that are the kiosks. Maybe that's in a beta test?

About the initial question, it wasn't really about EAM flights but rather, flights that get in at night, aircraft is shutdown, gate closed and everyone goes home until it departs next morning. Didn't see this SO much at KBOS as I did at KMHT as it's not (or at least not when I was there) a 24 hour airport. WIth the exception of some Fedex flights, I believe last arrivals on a fairly on time day, were around 10-11pm. Those aircraft and the ones that came in just before them (maybe as early as 8-9pm) were aircraft that were based there and may not leave until 8am so, not QUITE the same as simply extending the turnaround time. Aircraft is shutoff, crew is having dinner and drinks somewhere airline staff is at home (griping about what a crazy day it was), etc. Maybe there could even be a fee for overnight parking .. both for airlines AND general aviation traffic. GA planes just passing through pay only the landing fees / slot fees and terminal usage while those who wish to call your airport home will have to pay a daily fee for the privilege.

[Scifiwriterguy]

Originally posted by CaptainOcdadd:

Staff scheduling? Did I miss something? Only thing I've seen related to that are the kiosks. Maybe that's in a beta test?

Aye, it's in the Edge branch. You can tune your staffing so you're not running at 100% staffing (with its expense) when your airport is at a quiet time of day. :) There's been lively debate over the best ways to array security coverage relative to pax numbers. Optimization can be so much fun.

Originally posted by CaptainOcdadd:

About the initial question, it wasn't really about EAM flights but rather, flights that get in at night, aircraft is shutdown, gate closed and everyone goes home until it departs next morning. Didn't see this SO much at KBOS as I did at KMHT as it's not (or at least not when I was there) a 24 hour airport. WIth the exception of some Fedex flights, I believe last arrivals on a fairly on time day, were around 10-11pm. Those aircraft and the ones that came in just before them (maybe as early as 8-9pm) were aircraft that were based there and may not leave until 8am so, not QUITE the same as simply extending the turnaround time. Aircraft is shutoff, crew is having dinner and drinks somewhere airline staff is at home (griping about what a crazy day it was), etc. Maybe there could even be a fee for overnight parking .. both for airlines AND general aviation traffic. GA planes just passing through pay only the landing fees / slot fees and terminal usage while those who wish to call your airport home will have to pay a daily fee for the privilege.

Yup, I follow. At present, though, the best you can do is shut down the GAD once the last flight has left; there's no provision for overnight parking. (Also assuming my memory isn't misfiring and you can schedule your GAs. Given how this week has gone, who knows what the hell is going to tumble out of my head.)

That said, having overnighting as part of an airline demand or a flight requirement, that could be very interesting - especially if/when hardstands are implemented so you can marshal effectively. (Airline wants to house their plane overnight, fine, but if you're running 24 hour ops, tow it over to the stand to free up the gate - just as long as it's back in place at call time.) That would certainly add some difficulty to scheduling and logistics planning... I like it. :)

[Moose]

At present R&D always concerns airport things vs. aircraft things. Night flights re aircraft things, could be engine noise abatement, etc., but airport R&D would mostly be noise abatement on the ground, i.e. noise fences R&D.

If they wanted to extend the R&D to EAM flights, they could only allow flights on N-S or E-W runways (for noise). one or the other, maybe random, after an R&D project. Or, much later in the dev cycle, only allow cargo flights in the EAM times.

They could also restrict EAM schedules to 737 sizes or smaller for noise reasons.

Lots of ways to go.

[Neuro Divergent]

"Tow it over" Lol! I like it .. and it reminds me again of KMHT when Southwest really started monopolizing the place. They had 3 terminal gates but had (I think) 6 or more stands. Evening flights would come in, deplane and then push back into a stand on the other side of the taxilane. Oh God, there's another thought: taxilanes as an offshoot of taxiways. I recall a meeting at Manchester where the airlines were asked to instruct their pilots to NOT taxi through another airlines ramp. In fact I think it WAS Southwest that was being VIOLATED, so to speak. For anyone but Southwest, coming off runway 18/36 and turning off to the terminal, you have to taxi down alpha all the way to echo in order to reach your ramp. However, if you turn off alpha at delta, then follow golf around you can shave some time off your taxi. (See: https://aeronav.faa.gov/d-tpp/1902/00246AD.PDF) That's fine except, that part of golf is effectively Southwests .. running between their gates and pushback stands. If you were to build an airport like that, a taxilane could be dedicated to your Southwest airline so that only it could use it for pathfinding. I have NO IDEA how much of a headache that would be to code .. Im just throwing out ideas. Lol

[Neuro Divergent]

Interesting thought about EAM flights being mostly cargo. I've found this to be the case a lot but, isn't it also interesting that (IRL) many cargo airlines use older, LOUDER aircraft? The 727 with the old JT8-Ds .. doesn't get much louder than that .. besides the 737-200s which I THINK had the same engines.Nothing to do with the game but, did make me just think of that.

I really like this whole noise abatement thing .. but now (as is often the case) I'm going to make things difficult. (Lol) when staring a new game, it could randomly generate a basic prevailing wind pattern that would help you design your runway layout. It could also indicate obstacles (example: Tall buildings to the north) and noise intolerant neighborhoods. So you would then have the challenge of setting things up to optimize for your location.

Speaking of location, I saw it brought up on another site, the idea of "international gates." On a very basic, there could be a dropdown to select your airports country combined with the home country of each airline in the airline config file. Then, any airline that is not based in the same country as your airport would require a customs area between the gate and baggage claim. A more detailed idea would involve having the actual lat/lon of each airlines home city, as well as those of your airport location .. then a simple great circle mapper equation would give the distance between the 2 which could be used to select appropriate aircraft for their flights. I basically have a few different sets of configs of mod airlines depending on what I want to make. Right now it's based in the US so I've unmarked all short haul aircraft from Europe so only widebodies and jumbos/super jumbos come from there. Don't know if that would be too much of a headache to implement for potentially a very minor realism tweak but, tossing it out there.

[Moose]

There is a certain level of geographic abstraction in the base game in terms of the map being a perfectly flat, treeless, water-less area not surrounded by any urban or suburban areas. At this point in the dev cycle I don't know if the devs want to go beyond that as they seem to be focusing more on inside-the-terminal algorithms. I, for one, as an amateur, wouldn't know how prevailing winds affect runways unless I were schooled.

I do like the idea of international flights and a new customs/immigration zone type. That fits into the overall theme of terminal design very well.

I'd also like some portion of arriving passengers to be transfers and not final destinations, staying in the airport and using the retail and food service before leaving on a new flight while not consuming ticketing or security capacity. But that too is probably deeply embedded in the current routines and very hard to do.