Terminal Allocation

[pocketdynamo87]

Hey guys!

I have created a few custom schedules with EliGrim's amazing schedule creator. Can't praise him enough for building that tool, it's been a great help.

I do have a question however, concerning the allocation of terminals. Every arriving flight will check for available gates/ramps in a specific order. In case you have assigned more than one terminal to a specific airline, the flight will check one terminal first, than the other. My question is: Is there any way to change that order, so that the flight doesn't check terminal A first and terminal B second, but the other way around? I've tried changing the order of terminals in the terminal file (putting terminal B ahead of terminal A), as it seemed to me that it's following the order of appearance in that file. But that didn't do the trick

Specifically I'm concerned about the freight ramps at PHNL. I found that at the Terminal_Cargo North with its four ramps, there's not enough space to accommodate all Aloha Air Cargo and Northern Air Cargo operations. Since the accident of Transair flight 810, the FAA has grounded Rhoades Aviation. Therefore, there's more space available at Terminal_Cargo West. So I decided to put Aloha there, as well. As Cargo North has ramps suitable for large aircraft, but Cargo West only has ramps suitable for medium aircraft, I'd like to primarily use Cargo West for the 73F's, so that North doesn't get blocked by them in case a 76Y or other heavy arrives. Therefore, I'd like arriving aircraft to first check for available ramps at Cargo West and only secondly to check at Cargo North. Automatically, it primarily checks as North, though.

Any ideas how to change that?

[Braf123456]

Unfortunately the way the game is designed it doesn’t allow a person to change where the planes park at a certain terminal hopefully with the next version it will allow more freedom 

[andredragt]

There is some info in this and following posts about terminal priority (discussion was started in completely the wrong post :p)

 

[crbascott]

13 hours ago, pocketdynamo87 said:

Any ideas how to change that?

To summarize the thread @andredragtposted and directly answer your question - no, you can’t change the order of the terminal/gates used. 

[pocketdynamo87]

Thanks guys! No wonder I didn't find anything useful with the search function, when it's buried deeply in an unrelated topic... 😄

I did find a work around and assigned Aloha to terminal 3 instead. I just hope that they have a better solution for that in the next version...

[crbascott]

33 minutes ago, pocketdynamo87 said:

I just hope that they have a better solution for that in the next version...

Just curious, what would you propose?

[FeelThere_Vic]

Depends from a few things our development blog for October will likely discuss the schedule system we created for Tower! Simulator 3. I just saw it yesterday and to be honest I can't really imagine any weird scenario which would break it (a regional cargo jet flying international with a special livery using a different airline's callsign).

[pocketdynamo87]

3 hours ago, crbascott said:

Just curious, what would you propose?

Valid question. I guess it depends on how complicated you'd want to make it.

The most simple idea would probably be to let aircraft check all the terminals for the smallest suitable gate first before picking a bigger one. For example: Airline A is assigned to terminals 1 and 2. There's a medium size aircraft (e.g. Boeing 737 or Airbus A320) arriving. If there are no medium gates available at terminal A, it would then check for medium size gates at terminal 2, and only in the case when there are no medium size gates available either, it would then pick a large gate at terminal A.

Another idea would be to simply make it possible to assign priorities to the terminals, possibly for each airline individually (in case more than one terminal is assigned to an airline). Or, more complicated, to even assign individual gates or ramps to the airlines or even individual flights in the schedule file.

[MJKERR]

The main reason this does not work is the terminal file is airlines only, there are basically no other editable variables

Tower 3D does split aircraft types, but even that is flawed as it is prop / medium / heavy only
This becomes an issue at airports which have aircraft specific type gates, such as KLAX (two B777-300 gates for American) and EGLL (A380 Super gates)

It was possible to apply this in Tower 2011 through the airport editor
For EGLL A380 could then sent to specific stands

Oddly at EGLL I managed to split British Airways flights, which removed Heavy at Terminal 5A which is extremely rare as it reduces capacity

[crbascott]

5 hours ago, MJKERR said:

The main reason this does not work is the terminal file is airlines only, there are basically no other editable variables

True, but we’re talking about the next version. Any talk about the current version is pointless.

I would think we’ll see a much different “terminal file” in the next version based on wishlist items and hints from Vic.