Cargo suggestions

Hi,

I started playing with a cargo subsidiary in Aspern.

I have a few ideas that I feel might make cargo ops simulate real world a little better.

1)

Remove flight time effect from ORS ratings. Why ? Unlike people, cargo doesn't really care weather it takes 12 hours to get from A to B or if it takes 20 hours. So as long as the cargo connects (the 8 hour window), it would get the same rating regardless of travel time. That would allow us to schedule cargo flights like they do them in the real world, capacity over frequency. For example Cargolux only has B747-400Fs in it's fleet, but I doubt that would work in AS...

2)

Introduce trucks. Yes trucks ! That's what real cargo carriers do too. They have trucks that appear as flights in their schedules to do some extra short distances that are not viable to be flown in any case. For example something like DUS-LUX is never worth flying, even with a ATR72F. Truck connections can suffer in the ORS rating, but be easily offset with a price. Also trucks do not consume slots...

Thank you for your suggestions. We appreciate your ideas but some of them are not practical in AirlineSim due to several reasons or are not that easy as you may think of.

The transportation time matters for some kind of freight - for others it doesn't. If it wouldn't matter at all, there wouldn't be a need for freighter airline service on short haul routes and everything would be transported by truck, train or ship. To solve this, we would need - like also disucssed in this years convention in MUC - several classes of freight. The perishable freight, life stock, valuable, urgent, large, mail/parcel etc.... But this would blow up the demand system und would lead to a needed server performance which can't be given.

We do have a RFS (road feeder service) - we call this the ground network. Freight will be transported by truck (or ship or train) within a specific distance (depending a bit on how many other airports are found in this distance).