44 replies to this topic

[sviridovt]

I like some of the suggestions on this thread.

The one I agree the most with is that terminals should be massively more expensive to build. They should also take time to build, say 6 months to a year. Also, I second the motion of limiting the amount of additional terminals that an airport can have. After all, real estate is not unlimited at airports or anywhere for that matter.

If hubs are to be more expensive, perhaps to make things easier on startups, a hub in one's home-base city could be at a discount (say the price of hubs now), as if it were a tax-break given to the airline by the city, while subsequent hubs could cost 3 or 4 times as much.

Eryk's suggestion about leasing companies is great. Even with a C credit rating, an airline can lease many planes. It takes little time to get it moved up to an AA credit rating anyways...

There are also way too many gates at most airports. The airport in my hometown of Kamloops, BC (YKA) has 4 gates, in AE, there are 25. Nearby Kelowna, BC has 6 or 7, but has 50 in the game.

On the flipside, it would be nice to see a larger amount of connecting passengers at hubs without having to have hundreds of flights connecting to it. I don't see why a hub with 7 or 8 fully used gates can't have a large amount of connecting passengers. 7 full gates is 350 slots, which would be 50 daily departures & arrivals, plenty of opportunities for connections in my mind...

I see a problem with having a limit on how many gates could be build, because in the beginning airlines would build 50 gates at an airport (and thats more then I operate even out of my biggest hubs at Miami and New York) which would prevent other airlines from moving into said airport. Also in some airport where all of the gates are leased already you have to build a terminal if you want to operate out of there, or if you want to operate more then 5 gates without opening a hub (some cities that have really high demand you would have more than 5 gates there)

[txaggie]

Limiting gates is a tricky issue, because if the airport, in say, Kamloops had additional airlines willing to enter that market, I can guarantee beyond the smallest shadow of a doubt, that they would find a place for the new airline to operate even if all the gates at present have been dished out. Same goes for but a handful of airports out there in the world.

Lack of common-use gates, especially within alliances, kind of forces the additional gates.

[sviridovt]

Limiting gates is a tricky issue, because if the airport, in say, Kamloops had additional airlines willing to enter that market, I can guarantee beyond the smallest shadow of a doubt, that they would find a place for the new airline to operate even if all the gates at present have been dished out. Same goes for but a handful of airports out there in the world.

Lack of common-use gates, especially within alliances, kind of forces the additional gates.

of course, the most known example of this would be Honk Kong (they used to use Kai-Tak) they couldnt find space, so they built new airport instead, so if they did that, I bet an airport would expand

[Willo]

It's worth noting that, under the current AE system, Southwest would have around 20 hubs.

[berubium]

Limiting gates is a tricky issue, because if the airport, in say, Kamloops had additional airlines willing to enter that market, I can guarantee beyond the smallest shadow of a doubt, that they would find a place for the new airline to operate even if all the gates at present have been dished out. Same goes for but a handful of airports out there in the world.

Lack of common-use gates, especially within alliances, kind of forces the additional gates.

I agree with that statement completely. In fact, Kamloops Airport even made significant improvements to attract WestJet & Horizon Air a few short years ago. Small market airports often invest big to attract more carriers & more routes... I wasn't trying to say that AE airports should have the exact same amount of gates as their real-life counterparts, but perhaps the number could be brought down somewhat.

Also, if an airport (of any size) were to get saturated & be left with no available gates (or say only 5% remaining gates or something), perhaps the airport could begin an expansion project & make new gates available after a few months (simulated construction period). I remember the old SNES game Aerobiz Supersonic doing that...

If common-use gates for alliances occurs in the future, I really hope that the number of gates in an airport come down. If that were to happen, I would pick & choose my alliances more carefully as it seems that the mega-alliances with 10+ airlines have zero cohesion & just compete against each other anyways.

I also like the idea of common-use gates in general. Many gates in many airports are generic in that they don't necessarily always serve the same airline; it's just the slots that are being leased...