If we have more realistic demand, ticket pricing

This. 

 

Demand is too much in and between many markets.

 

One thing being the game's database seemingly not differentiating between O&D and connecting passengers at many airports- which is artificially adding demand that's not there in real life.

 

For example, I'm looking at an airline right now that operates a massive trans-continental operation out of Columbus, Ohio. While it is perhaps plausible an airline could develop a hub at CMH and support some level of international traffic- it seems unlikely that there are 51 passengers a day looking for a flight between Columbus and Kolkata, India. And with 44 other hubs in a highly saturated USA, it seems unlikely this particular airline should be finding enough connecting passengers to have any sort of hub operation from Columbus, Ohio.

 

Perhaps the more egregious hub is the one at Grand Rapids- there's actually 2 more airlines running fairly substantial but non hub operations out of GRR, too. 2 flights a week to Tunis, Tunisia? Really? 5 combined flights a week to Moscow's 3 airports? Seriously?

 

Demand seems to be scaled wrong, allowing airlines to become too large in too many markets. 

 

 

Tickets prices are arguably too high at first, allowing for airlines to really blow the doors to expansion open very, very quickly.

What PHX has on it's side is that you can only get so big over at LAX. As for caring less, I meant the functionality of the hub itself as that's what I thought he commented on. The problem with you saying that the Northeast is O & D based, is that a good 30% of CLT's passengers come from the Northeast. Cut them out (because of DCA/PHL/JFK/even ORD to an extent) and you have very little people from the Northeast flying in therefore affecting the loads on connecting flights. The same could be said with the west. In fact, out of the Top 10 busiest routes out of CLT, 4 of them are from the Northeast (replaceable) and 3 of them are current AA or US hubs. That leaves Atlanta, Houston (DFW can do that job 10x better), and Orlando (MIA works just fine.)

 

US Airways has made the CLT-DCA-PHL dynamic work, so I think the question is how the two bookends at JFK and MIA effect the network.

 

American's operation at JFK is O&D based- sorry if I insinuated the northeast in its entirety is. AA at JFK is international traffic and a handful of primarily domestic trunk routes. I'm sure they may attempt to expand some, but I think it'd be focused on their O&D traffic- it'd be hella expensive and difficult, and probably impossible, to do anything massive. Delta is trying, but they're still somewhat limited and still heavy on the O&D traffic.

 

I think it would probably make more sense to keep the connections running through PHL and CLT. Its cheaper, its easier, they're more established. CLT in particular is the most established/the largest, the easiest to expand, etc... I'd find it strange if you break that apart at PHL and CLT to try to build the same thing in the arguably less favorable situation at JFK.

 

You break up CLT, and I'm sure Delta is seeing dollar signs, hearing cha-chings, and probably sniffing blood. They may try to further degrade CLT via pumping up ATL to an even larger operation than it currently is.

 

As for MIA, I can understand some of it- but its still kind of the same thing. Why pull back something that is working at CLT to move down to MIA and be in a less favorable location for many markets. I can definitely see MIA pulling some of CLT's Carribean and Latin American traffic and that leading to some further domestic cuts at CLT...but to lose half of their flights? Its just not what I think will happen, but I guess we'll see.

AA could care less about how bad MIA is for connections... it is more logical for Latin America (one of CLT's main missions.) Therefore, it will be used more.

 

*Could *not* care less, but that's not going to be their (its actually going to be a lot of US AIrways management) attitude. You don't simply not care about connecting the southeast United States and the northeast United States- AA didn't fight to make Raleigh/Durham work because they didn't care.

 

p.s. Regarding all of their hubs, there are some in the industry that believe AA-US are taking this merger a little different than the past two and will look to keep their system pretty much intact.

 

It could be PHX that needs to worry the most considering its location between DFW and LAX although perhaps that will signify a retreat east and that may not be something they want to do.

Unfortunately, I see CLT being the Cincinnati of the hub. It can't sustain service based off of O&D (like PHX) and it's use for US Airways is covered by JFK, DFW, & MIA. It will probably be chopped down to 200-300 daily flights(currently 655), meaning it will lose a good 50% of it's flights.  Most likely, it will lose LH and at least 1 of the 2 AC jets. As for OW, I could see BA adding a 3-5 times weekly flight. I could also see Qatar airlines doing the same.

 

You're forgetting that PHL is US AIrways, but I cannot see any scenario in which that happens to CLT. MIA is O&D and in an awful location for non-Caribbean and Latin American connecting traffic. Perhaps you'll see cutbacks, but Miami is not in a position to takeover for CLT. CLT may lose some traffic headed internationally to the south, and see some reductions from domestic markets because of that, but MIA is limited in what it can serve.

 

JFK is an O&D operation for American, and they don't really have the room to make it anything else. It will be interesting to see how the JFK_PHL dynamic plays out, though

 

Cincy got beat up because it didn't really offer anything that ATL and Detroit could do, and Memphis was Northwest's attempt to compete with Cincy, Atlanta, and DFW, so it got pulled back, too. CVG and MEM fill in the gaps between Atlanta and Detroit and compete a little with DFW. 

 

There isn't that kind of cannibalism between CLT and the other hubs, so I really feel as if they are mostly safe. But only time will tell...

In the real world, British Airways operates an all business class flight from London City to New York JFK.

The Concorde is so unprofitable in game because it is currently modelled as flying with the afterburners on all the time. In reality it was capable of supercruise and was rather efficent. I think the Soviet SSTs were incapable of supercruise and actually required afterburners, however.

 

Its efficiency is debatable. It didn't hold enough passengers/airlines could not charge a large enough premium to cover the fuel expense. Part of the problem was it was incredibly inefficient at low speeds- it burned large amounts of fuel just taxiing to the runway. It was inefficient over shorter flights for similar reasons.

 

The Concorde was a neat plane chock full of neat ideas- but it should have never been more than a proof of concept model. It failed for a hundred reasons, and I just assume until we have noise restraints, structural issues, cabin environment issues, etc... it might as well fail in the game because of its fuel usage. 

 

But yes, I would agree the game's fuel consumption is rather rudimentary. 

Also, regarding "Real Names" to the airplanes, that could be left to each player to decide if we want our SX-AAA become, for instance,  "Queen Frederika" or just leave it like that, SX-AAA. 

 

I would think you would have both the registration (SX-AAA) and if you want, you can the nickname (Queen Frederika).

In the real world, you have to have the registration for legal/governmental purposes. You won't, or shouldn't, ever see a real plane without the SX-AAA painted somewhere near the tail. 

I chimed in at the beginning.

 

I'll chime in again-

 

Ive always wanted to operate one of thsoe tiny regional 7 seater airlines...an island hopper in Alaska kind of thing, or the australian outback or perhaps just a 3 legged flight between two small american cities before hitting a major hub. .This requires two layers, flights and itineraries.

 

I fly from A to B to C to D to E to F to G (which perhaps is a hub) which also flies to H, I, J, K, L, M, and various other combinations such as A to D to E to G, etc..., etc... You fill the seats on the different segments via 100 different itineraries.

 

As it is now, you have to set up separate flights filling with their own demand between A and B, and B and C, and C and D, etc... Demand between two small towns is usually too low to sustain anything, and making them all hubs to enable the generation of connecting passengers also unsustainable.

 

That might make no sense at all, I wrote that in about 5 seconds.

I was wondering if we can change the original settings and build airport terminals in foreign soil since in the real world companies do own airport terminals in foreign countries. One obvious example would be Terminal 7 at JFK which is owned by British Airways, Terminal 1 is also owned by four different foreign carriers - Lufthansa, Air France, Japan Airlines and Korean Air. There are also many more examples but the point is, the restriction that airlines cannot build terminals on foreign soil does not relate to real life, so I think this has to be changed. Hope this would make the game fairer and more realistic.

 

Pretty sure Terminal 1 isn't owned by the consortium. T7 is the only terminal in the USA that is operated by a foreign carrier. T7 has all of 12 gates and even has had some non-Oneworld airlines flying out of it.

 

The issue of building, owning, and operating terminals is a sticky one- even for domestic airlines in their native countries.

 

If we wanted to be realistic, you'd only be, if you got lucky, approved to fly about 10 frequencies max into any given foreign country and you would probably have no interest in building and owning a terminal (unless you could rent it out to other airlines).     

 

As the poster above said already...I think community and alliance-operated gates and terminals is the way to go, and I'm very interested to see how its implemented. If not handled carefully, I think it has the potential of pushing realistic worlds towards open worlds.

Something is not quite right with the new way of listing which planes can be used for adding flights. The new dropdown for adding flights quite happily lets the user select a particular type of plane, listing planes available like the 777 and a340, despite the face that these cannot fly to\from Dallas Love Field.

 

Assuming the runway is long enough, I'm pretty sure those planes can fly from Love Field. They just can't fly outside the (ever changing) boundary.

 

Also, I'm not sure if the game repeals the amendment in 2014 as will happen in real life.

Right, pax on LAX-JFK would decide to take a connecting route only if the price is low enough to compensate for the extra duration (and inconvenience). Direct flights should have an advantage.

As for stopovers, this system would allow for it naturally without feeling it's hacked on and duct taped together.

 

What about us nuts who look to stop in every airport possible on our trips between Point A and Point B? 

 

Do it by population of the metro area. If a city has a population of 20,000 people then let's say the airport would have 2,000 PAX a year.

Let me start by saying my college degree is in civil engineering, a split focus in environmental engineering and multi-modal transportation engineering. I spent many of my college days doing complex modeling of the movement of people and goods.


O&D traffic numbers are widely available for the airports in many countries.

As a data collector, I've discussed these in chat before. For the great majority of airports in this game, the numbers are already O&D. For the aforementioned DFW, and other large hub airports, demand in this game is completely out of whack.

I've advocated an assumption that, in real life, demand is met by airlines. I.E, the market is extremely efficient, if not overly saturated. Next, I would create "metro areas" under which demand for airports within that area are combined. This demand would be based on reported O&D traffic only.

Ultimately, it would be great to have a population density overlay combined with economic, tourist, etc... factors (which are included in the database, but not used...although they are very rough and need a lot of work for accuracy purposes!) Perhaps for each country, we could enter its GDP, World Tourism rankings, etc... It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be closer than what we have. Demand for an airport would be based on local population density, airport distance from populations, and the economic, tourist, etc... factors.

And yes, I am talking a long, long ways down the line, as in years.