Gate Usage.

[xp1459]

I noticed that when a plane lands at an airport, it uses up a gate slot as long the plane is stationed at the airport.
But is there a way for planes to de-gate and go to holding spots and free up an gate for the next plane. Cause i have some flights that has planes waiting for a whole day at a time which hogs up a gate till it takes off the next day.

[Unknown98]

I'm not sure how I'd do that in the back-end. It may be possible if I get creative with it. But how would you determine when it's acceptable for the plane to de-gate or when it should stay at the gate?

Additionally, and maybe somebody with more knowledge than me can comment on this, how is it done in real life? Will aircraft de-gate and transition to a parking spot if they're staying overnight or for an extended period of time, or will it remain at the gate? There's only so much parking available I would assume.

[squaregatescrub]

easiest way around this on our end(users) is to just buy more gates. the game is very fair with it's gate prices.

[xp1459]

I understand adding more gates to an airport is easy, but realistically no airline will have 100+ dedicated gates at an airport.

My idea is that we have a system to check if it is preparing for a flight, if it is it takes a gate.
If the flight is in progress of a turnaround it takes a gate.
If the aircraft is not preparing for a flight or being turned around it is de-gated.

[ALT2870]

I'm not sure how I'd do that in the back-end. It may be possible if I get creative with it. But how would you determine when it's acceptable for the plane to de-gate or when it should stay at the gate?

Additionally, and maybe somebody with more knowledge than me can comment on this, how is it done in real life? Will aircraft de-gate and transition to a parking spot if they're staying overnight or for an extended period of time, or will it remain at the gate? There's only so much parking available I would assume.

Depends on the airport, but not uncommon for aircraft to be towed to a ramp area when not in use for an extended period of time. This is especially true when short on gates. I personally would love to see this as well.

In terms of in-game, I would say when the aircraft status is preparing for route and when the status is gray is when it is not occupying a gate.

[USA]

I'm not sure how I'd do that in the back-end. It may be possible if I get creative with it. But how would you determine when it's acceptable for the plane to de-gate or when it should stay at the gate?

Additionally, and maybe somebody with more knowledge than me can comment on this, how is it done in real life? Will aircraft de-gate and transition to a parking spot if they're staying overnight or for an extended period of time, or will it remain at the gate? There's only so much parking available I would assume.

This is actually a pretty common practice at overnight outstations. Usually they just find tarmac space relatively close to the terminal (it's an actual painted parking spot, but this is essentially the only use) to keep aircraft overnight for airports that have a lot of late night/early morning flights but either the airline or the airport doesn't have the gate space to accommodate all aircraft at a gate overnight.

You could potentially set it up so that if there's 2 hours (as an example) or more between the "ready at" time and an hour prior to the next scheduled departure (to simulate gate space needed for boarding) the aircraft is moved to an arbitrary parking spot. Only question is what/how would you assess a parking charge for this?

[Unknown98]

There would need to be some kind of parking charge, probably depending on the length of time it's parked. Although that would be complicated to determine how long an aircraft was parked. I could potentially move aircraft to parking spots when the status is on-ground or preparing for route, as ALT said. But changing the aircraft location X hours prior to take-off would be difficult to accomplish because I'd have to try and calculate what aircraft need to be moved, and when, and then store that time somewhere, and then run a script or something to transition the aircraft into/out of parking without user involvement. That starts to get difficult very quickly.

I will be changing some of the gate usage code soon with the new routes system so maybe I can look into how I could do something like this.