Anyone successful with XL Gates?

[DJ]

My planes are late or cancelled from XL Gates. How do you successfully unload and load planes from XL gates? Everything works great at my S and L gates.

[Doomhero]

Do you have a long enough runway? If you do then do you have enough runways to handle how many flights you have? Is the gate functioning correctly?

[joscha999]

From what you wrote I'm guessing that you actually have planes landing and departing but cannot get the planes filled completely, if there's some issue with the gate itself please let us know what exactly!

Generally you want to find the area of your airport that is slowing down the whole process and fix it. Some things to consider:
- Can your pax come to your airport (or is transport capacity too low)?
- Can pax get through ticketing without queueing for long?
- Can pax get through security without queueing for long?
- Can pax reach all their objectives or are they blocked / have to take long routes?
- Are pax distracted by stuff near the security or pre-security and don't go to the gate? (Add PA speakers in those areas)!
- Is your boarding quick enough (may need more gate desks) and/or your turnaround time set too low (mind that SA has a different time scale, you won't get turnarounds like in real life, try using around double what is usually working in real time - even though that may be too short still)?
- Is everything staffed?

As you can see there's a lot to take care for when building an airport. One tip I can give everyone is trying to be a passenger inside your airport, start off with the dropoffs and go all the way to the gate using ticketing and security. In most cases that's the quickest way to find problems :)

[Railsplitter]

Make sure you have enough baggage trucks. I was operating 3 gates with 1 truck and half my flights were being cancelled. I finally realized the baggage was loading too slowly. Added 2 more trucks and suddenly my flights were leaving on time and customer satisfaction shot up from 81% to 92% in just hours. Also stopped losing runway fees, terminal fees, and perfect operations bonuses.

[Snowpig]

My best practice here is: one medium hangar per XL-gate with two baggage and one fuel truck.
Set the gate times as following:
<100 pax: 2 hours
<200 pax: 3 hours
<300 pax: 4 hours
all others: 5 hours

After accepting contracts and placing them in the schedule check your transportation if it can handle the pax load. When flights take off delayed, check their passenger flow the next day - usually you will get an idea where the pax lose too much time.

[sonar1313]

Originally posted by Snowpig:

My best practice here is: one medium hangar per XL-gate with two baggage and one fuel truck.
Set the gate times as following:
<100 pax: 2 hours
<200 pax: 3 hours
<300 pax: 4 hours
all others: 5 hours

After accepting contracts and placing them in the schedule check your transportation if it can handle the pax load. When flights take off delayed, check their passenger flow the next day - usually you will get an idea where the pax lose too much time.

You should for sure be able to get planes in and out of an XL gate faster than 4 or 5 hours. I haven't done a whole lot of experimenting to find out exactly how many hangars and vehicles needed to support per gate, but I think two baggage cars and one fuel truck per gate is almost certainly too much as well.

If you stagger arrival times pretty well, you should probably be able to get away with half that many vehicles and maybe fewer. Baggage can be loaded and unloaded any time within the time your plane is at the gate, so they have a few hours to get it done.

You may be bottlenecking (and the OP as well) by using only one GAD per XL gate. Use two, and the passengers will load very quickly. A 500+ pax plane can easily be handled in three hours if it's close to security. Further away from security, you may need to add 30-60 minutes.

IMO the best way to figure out the problem with a gate by watching it all day long and always highlighting the pax for the currently loading flight, as soon as that flight arrives. Then you can see what takes them so long to load. 4 or 5 hours is usually not necessary - the biggest flights should be able to load in no more than 3.5 hours.

[Snowpig]

I always use 2 GADs per gate and usually even the 747/380 are done in around three hours. But since I do not use queues in my security or at the gates, the total boarding times have a large variance. Therefore I go full 5 hours for the largest jets.