Weather delays

[Sora]

Delay times sound quite reasonable. I guess, scheduling your aircraft to remain on the ground for an additional hour or two, after turn-around's done, does make a lot of sense given certain weather phenomena. Well, not a problem for long-distance flights I'd say, but it's certainly going to be interesting for domestic services.

[Frenchie]

So I presume it will be possible for a regular service between Mumbai and New Delhi to accumulate delays every time they land - say at Mumbai with a thunderstorm -?

[Unknown98]

Yeah... that's kind of what I'm afraid of. I don't want to get into a situation where particular airports just have constant delays. Especially if they don't have delays so often in real life. I mean for example in Houston we have pop-up thunderstorms all the time. It downpours for 10 minutes and then goes away and the sun comes back out. I'm not sure if storms like that even cause a delay at all. Certainly not an hour or two delay. But if the game displays "thunderstorm" - well then that's all it sees. The fact that conditions may clear up in 15 minutes isn't known to the game. I'm already pushing the weather script to the maximum limit that I'm allowed to in order to update weather for all airports every 30 minutes. I can't make it refresh any quicker than that.

One idea I had was to check the weather conditions again for flights that have already been delayed... for example if a flight is delayed 60 minutes due to a thunderstorm at the origin airport, but then the weather updates and suddenly the thunderstorm goes away, I might be able to remove a portion of that delay depending on how much time has passed since the delay was initiated. Not sure I explained that well but I hope it makes sense lol.

[ALT2870]

Any type of thunderstorm within the immediate area of an airport will cause a ground hold. Mainly because ground crews have to get inside. How long it last is going to really depend. I do think at a minimum it is going to be at least 30 minutes. Think about it, it will take at least 5 minute getting crew in, 5 minutes out, that's a time loss. Then you have the time they are inside, then the delay in general (ex getting planes shuffled around), thirty minutes is by no means outlandish.

With the weather codes, I think that gives a good hint at how strong the storm might be hence why I put the less rain intensive storms lower. Re-look below. You can see a simple storm may max out at 60 minutes.

Weather Min Delay Max Delay
thunderstorm with light rain 30 60
thunderstorm with rain 60 90
thunderstorm with heavy rain 90 120
light thunderstorm 30 45
thunderstorm 60 120
heavy thunderstorm 120 240
ragged thunderstorm 240 360
thunderstorm with light drizzle 30 60
thunderstorm with drizzle 60 90
thunderstorm with heavy drizzle 90 120

But as you said Unk, if we have a heavy thunderstorm that only last 10 minutes, yes, it is somewhat unfair. I do like that last part about the delays and makes perfect sense. Really it's the only balancing act you can add to it. (The other layer we haven't added that weather is being drawn not always from the airport but could be miles away.) In the end it's a give and take. Possibly the best way to do it is implement it and gather data. Then we can fine tune times and such as it goes.

[khush37]

When a plane is delayed, would it be using a gate during the delay?

[Unknown98]

But as you said Unk, if we have a heavy thunderstorm that only last 10 minutes, yes, it is somewhat unfair. I do like that last part about the delays and makes perfect sense. Really it's the only balancing act you can add to it. (The other layer we haven't added that weather is being drawn not always from the airport but could be miles away.) In the end it's a give and take. Possibly the best way to do it is implement it and gather data. Then we can fine tune times and such as it goes.

Concerning weather being drawn from miles away, in most cases (at major airports anyway) it should actually be drawing weather from the airport itself. Most airports have a weather station on-site and that is what the game is using as well because it grabs weather via lat/lon coordinates rather than city.

When a plane is delayed, would it be using a gate during the delay?

Hmm... hadn't thought about that. I guess if it's delayed on takeoff then yes it would be using the gate but if it's delayed on landing it would not be. Not sure if I can work that into the game though. Maybe I can, we'll see.

[Aeal]

Just to put this out there for every route we create we should also have alternate airports just incase the airport gets shut down due to bad weather and the aircraft can automatically divert to the alternate chosen which is relatively close by. If that is not a hassle to add

[Unknown98]

Hmm.. may not be too hard. Although that will break the route so you’d have to manually fly back in order to restart the route.

[ALT2870]

That's a cool idea. I wouldn't have an issue making the aircraft go somewhere. Maybe a notification? "Aircraft "xxxx" has been diverted, you will need to dispatch to "xxxx"."

[Unknown98]

Might want to make it optional though, some people may prefer to just take the delay and keep everything on track. I mean personally I wouldn't want to divert for a 2 or 3 hour delay. But if it's a hurricane or something and will be several days then yeah, divert. Or be proactive and re-route the aircraft on different routes, one of the two.