Terminal usage and airplane age

Hi guys,

Thanks for reading my topic in advance. Ok, lets get right into it, I have two ideas I´d like to share:

1) Change the way how the age of an A/C influences the rating in the ORS. In the real world a passenger judges an airplane by public perciption ("I know Boeing, Airbus, Embrear and Bombardier, I heard of them before, I trust them.") and by what they are offered on board. For example, the average passenger would rather fly in a 15 year old airplane that has a cabin which has been overhauled 2 months ago, than in a 5 year old plane which is still rocking the very first generation of worn out interior.

Your normal passenger will never ever check the flight number, find out the registration of the plane beeing used that day and look-up its age. No, they just board the plane and they see "Nice, fancy new seats and great lighting, I like that!" or "Eww, looks like straight from the ´90s...". Therefore I would recommend to drop the aircraft age rating and replace with something like how well the cabin in maintained, or just drop it all together.

2) Only few players buy into terminals, but especially long-term players tend to do and so did I.

I think it is pretty unrealistic that the game only calculates how many passengers in total per day are going trough your terminal and then compares it to the total available capacity per day. Its not like all departures and arrivals happen at the same time and than the airport is abbandonend for the rest of the day. No, all the arrivals and departures are spread out troughout the day.

Therefore I can handle over 82.000 passengers with a terminal capacity of just 30.000 and haven´t had a single cancelled flight yet, due to an overbooked terminal. I think it would be super helpful to have a graph, showing how many passengers depart/arrive at a certain point during the day. Then one could read out the peaks and design its terminals for the peaks.

Anyways, those are just two things that came into my mind, maybe you find them helpful, who knows. 

Best regards and sorry for my spelling errors, must be "fun" to read that crap  -_-

Nils

I’d support both of these changes in a new world.

If people felt it was necessary to offset the attractiveness of older planes, you could:

a) increase the liklihood of delays on older planes (due to tech issues);or

b) further increase the maintenance cost of older planes.

You could also introduce a separate age for aircraft interiors, forcing players to update the interior every few years or face ORS penalties.

B) further increase the maintenance cost of older planes.

You could also introduce a separate age for aircraft interiors, forcing players to update the interior every few years or face ORS penalties.

Older planes already have higher maintenance costs in the game. Cabin age feature would be nice e.g every 6 months cabin age bar decreases, so in order to stay in  green every player will have to update cabin every 30 months.

Something like what uzkt01 said was what I had in mind. That would make the game more interesting in the long run, imho, since you would have to actively invest in already existing airplanes and equipment, to keep the passengers satisfied. 

My first thought on the first point is that, yes, no actual client will really care of the age of the aircraft.

Yet, I'm not fully supporting this idea, because an airline only operating very old planes will in the end up having a degraded image in the general public. Of course, that would not be as clear as what is shown in the game, but hey, this is a simulation, which has some limits. Although I would agree that the current system is not the most realistic one, I would argue that it does the job: negatively impacting the image of companies running very old planes, over time.

@ Univ: But then again, look at big airlines like Lufthansa or Quantas. Their A340´s and 737´s (LH), or 767´s and 747´s (Quantas) are very old and still those airlines have a very good public perception, because both airlines heavily invest in the maintance of their aircraft. Luckily all those old planes are beeing phased out, but still, at least I believe they enjoy a good public realtion. Same is valid for bigger airlines like Delta who are using more than 180 rather old MD-88/MD-90 and still they are one of the biggest and most profitabel airlines in the world (according to "Aero International" 9/16).

@ Univ: But then again, look at big airlines like Lufthansa or Quantas. Their A340´s and 737´s (LH), or 767´s and 747´s (Quantas) are very old and still those airlines have a very good public perception, because both airlines heavily invest in the maintance of their aircraft. Luckily all those old planes are beeing phased out, but still, at least I believe they enjoy a good public realtion. Same is valid for bigger airlines like Delta who are using more than 180 rather old MD-88/MD-90 and still they are one of the biggest and most profitabel airlines in the world (according to "Aero International" 9/16).

Yes they do.

That would be why one old aircraft among other won't impact the rating so much, and also why the aircraft age is only one contributing factor among many others in the airline rating.

Looking at your examples, LH has old 737s (7 of those active actually, compared to ~50 much younger 32Xs), true. But brand new 380s and 777s for example. Average age is 10 years.

Similarly, Qantas has several old 747s, but also much more significantly younger 330s and 380s. Average age is also 10 years.

So yes. They still have a very good image by investing in maintenance. Which does also have an impact in AS.

And they have some old aircraft being phased out, but that's only a part of the complete airline image. Such as in AS.

In the end, completely removing the aircraft age as a contributing factor to the airline image really does not seem appropriate to me.

Regarding including cabin age as another image factor, I'm not really against it. But I would tend to consider this as already included in the maintenance part, paid regularly (usually, a lousy-maintained plane will also have a lousy-maintained interior). Not sure what would be the actual benefit of adding this new feature?

First, i think this topic has been discussed for several times. :)

If you are flying an aircraft that is still in production, you will hardly know or try to find out how old they are. There are old A330s and new A330s, if the airline refresh the cabin over the time, PAX won't notice the difference. How airline treated the aircraft is more important.  

People knows Delta has old planes because lots of model they used already out of production, especially the 'super80s', but this is more reflected in the image of aircraft type, should not as an individual image factor. It doesn't matter whether it's a 18 yrs old MD80 or a 25 yrs old MD80, for PAX, they are old because they are MD80s. Actually i think they will say it's old as long as it's a large T-tail jets (can be either MD80s or 90s).

The main issue for you to run old planes in real life is the maintenance. Delta's maintenance is even more a nightmare because they have different versions of aircraft since they purchased from different airlines. Even the same aircraft type, e.g. MD88, can have different versions when they were delivered to different airlines. AS is not that in detail yet, but it's really unnecessary detail for this game. Even this is the case, Delta still makes it work, so it's a much less worry for AS. 

1) Change the way how the age of an A/C influences the rating in the ORS. In the real world a passenger judges an airplane by public perciption ("I know Boeing, Airbus, Embrear and Bombardier, I heard of them before, I trust them.") and by what they are offered on board. For example, the average passenger would rather fly in a 15 year old airplane that has a cabin which has been overhauled 2 months ago, than in a 5 year old plane which is still rocking the very first generation of worn out interior.

Your normal passenger will never ever check the flight number, find out the registration of the plane beeing used that day and look-up its age. No, they just board the plane and they see "Nice, fancy new seats and great lighting, I like that!" or "Eww, looks like straight from the ´90s...". Therefore I would recommend to drop the aircraft age rating and replace with something like how well the cabin in maintained, or just drop it all together.

2) Only few players buy into terminals, but especially long-term players tend to do and so did I.

I think it is pretty unrealistic that the game only calculates how many passengers in total per day are going trough your terminal and then compares it to the total available capacity per day. Its not like all departures and arrivals happen at the same time and than the airport is abbandonend for the rest of the day. No, all the arrivals and departures are spread out troughout the day.

Therefore I can handle over 82.000 passengers with a terminal capacity of just 30.000 and haven´t had a single cancelled flight yet, due to an overbooked terminal. I think it would be super helpful to have a graph, showing how many passengers depart/arrive at a certain point during the day. Then one could read out the peaks and design its terminals for the peaks.

1. From what I know martin is aware of this and has talked about it sometime saying that it is on the to do list. Though the aircraft type rating will still be keep as a 737 classic and 737 MAX are not exactly the same even from the view of an experienced passenger. But the aircraft age rating might be replaced with cabin age sometime in the future.

2. In the world every terminal has a max passenger capacity and passengers always usually arrive in waves and then it gets let´s dense for a couple of hours and then the flood comes again. I am quite unsure of the meaning of this suggestion and could you please explain it. Also terminal capacity is calculated in weeks here in AS and not in days.

How airline treated the aircraft is more important.  

True that. I have seen many cabins both new and old and I would actually prefer some of the cleaned and maintained old cabins I have seen in front of mistreated new ones.

2. In the world every terminal has a max passenger capacity and passengers always usually arrive in waves and then it gets let´s dense for a couple of hours and then the flood comes again. I am quite unsure of the meaning of this suggestion and could you please explain it. Also terminal capacity is calculated in weeks here in AS and not in days.

I believe that's the OP's point: the same number of weekly passengers would have different capacity requirements IRL depending on schedule. If you schedule waves with all planes departing at once, the terminal could be overrun with passengers in peak times even if its "weekly" capacity is good - it's really the maximum number of simultaneous passengers that can be handled at once that's important, not the weekly figure. Not sure how to approach this in AS though, or even if it's worth it.

I believe that's the OP's point: the same number of weekly passengers would have different capacity requirements IRL depending on schedule. If you schedule waves with all planes departing at once, the terminal could be overrun with passengers in peak times even if its "weekly" capacity is good - it's really the maximum number of simultaneous passengers that can be handled at once that's important, not the weekly figure. Not sure how to approach this in AS though, or even if it's worth it.

Thanks. I fully agree that this would be very complicated in AS and it would give lower popularity to private terminals and even more players would use the standard terminals.

Older planes already have higher maintenance costs in the game. Cabin age feature would be nice e.g every 6 months cabin age bar decreases, so in order to stay in  green every player will have to update cabin every 30 months.

I think, this will not work (or at least doesn't make sense) until we have a complete different tool for cabin configuration. I think, it's stupid if you have to replace the cabin but have only the same old seats on offer.

I would prefer a solution via an updated maintenance tool for that. Let's say, with a bar, where you can define, how much time & money (or a percentage scale) you'd like to invest in your cabins. Invest much = rating stays high / invest few = rating starts to drop.

And I would really appreciate an updated maintenance tool at all - but that is a different story ;)

Looking at your examples, LH has old 737s (7 of those active actually, compared to ~50 much younger 32Xs), true. But brand new 380s and 777s for example. Average age is 10 years.

Fun fact 1: all remaining 737 are actually younger, than the oldest 14 A320 delivered to LH and another dozen now operating for Germanwings.

Fun fact 2: Germanwings' A320 subfleet is actually older (24.8 y) than Lufthansa's 737 fleet (24.7 y)