Modular Airports

[Ben_K]

Richk67 & Ben_K > You land several planes at the same time on the same runway in your countries ?

Im not quite sure what you are on but you seem to have made that information up?!

I can understand a few planes can approach at the same time, but they must engage fail approach procedure on final if a plane is still on the runway, even if it's at the opposite side...
What could happen if the already landing plane drop pieces of metal on the runway ? What could happen if the second plane have a brake issue while the first one is stuck at the end of the runway ?.

No, you dont have 2 planes on a runway. Nowhere in the world will. With all due respect Magicbuzz, this is what I do all day every day for a living. I work for one of the safest and most efficient Air traffic Service companies in the world. I spend my shift watching and listening to each aircraft and each one gets its permission when I know the runway is clear. It may be damn late sometimes, but thats how our airport works. Its no less safe that way than any other - you just have to know what you are doing. Its what makes us the best of our type in the world.

The only exception I know in France is on small airports that uses only one runway for landing and take off : a plane on the ground can enter the runway as soon as the landing plane passed its position.

Im not sure if you missed what Ive mentioned in previous posts... I work at the busiest single runway airport in the world (In fact, by that it would make our runway the busiest international runway anywhere in the world). We use this procedure for nearly every movement in a day... Its called 'conditional line-up clearance'.

[Born Acorn]

Born Acorn > Sorry, I didn't noticed the picture was too big on my wide screen

No problem, it's a common mistake.

[MagicBuzz]

Ben_K > oops. it seems i misunderstood something in the discussion. i thought you were landing planes while the runway was still not cleared.
(and when I see some pictures on airliners.net, I can believe some controler do even worst things )

[DaleStan]

Born Acorn > Sorry, I didn't noticed the picture was too big on my wide screen

No problem, it's a common mistake.

Fortunately, there's an attachment system, which has the habit of automagically preventing such problems.

[athanasios]

I have a question: We have 2 runways and when we had record movements we had 1 movement /~75 seconds. (This is not from my head, but from news reports.) So this gives 75x2= 150 seconds = 2,5 minutes for each plane/runway. How can a plane land or take off and clear the runway in 2,5 minutes? Doesn't this imply that when it started taking off another plane was entering the runway? How can it be safe?

I would like to ask the pretty lady in the photo, but since it is not possible, can you please answer me Ben_K?

[DaleStan]

Surely it's safe for the next plane to line up for takeoff as soon as the preceding plane gets a mile or so down the runway? Does the back-blast from the engines really extend that far?

Now, I wouldn't recommend that the following plane start accelerating until the runway is clear, but that's a different matter.

[Noldo]

Takeoff is no problem. There can be more that one plane lined up on the runway at the same time as long as the one in front is given the clearance first and the runway is long enough for the safety distances and the takeoff distance needed for the first plane.

Landing is the more difficult one but even with that the only limitation is that the runway must be clear before the landing clearance is given to the next aircraft. Sometimes the clearance can be given when the next plane is just 10 feets or something in the air and already on top of the runway. If the next plane doesn't have enough runway left at the time the clearance comes it will pull up and join the landing pattern at the point specified by the ATC.

[Ben_K]

Athanasios, basically what Noldo said Ive had 3 planes lined up ready for take-off before, with another one entering the runway behind the last one too. As long as you dont get them muddled up, then you're ok . You normally tell the 2nd planes that there will be another departure ahead of them as that helps to make sure they dont accept a clearance with someone in the way!!
As for 1 movement in 75 seconds... We aim to do 1 movement per minute here. Thats the minimum seperation most of the time so we work towards the maximum runway usage. If its a nice day, you can seperate them by watching them after take-off to make sure they dont get too close. In that situation, you can easily have 2 planes take-off 45 second apart. Sometimes even 30 secs if the 2nd one is slower
(As it happens, between 7.30 and 8.30 this morning I moved 58 movements in 1hour )

Now... my biggest question is: Is Noldo the blonde in that picture?

[richk67]

(As it happens, between 7.30 and 8.30 this morning I moved 58 movements in 1hour )

Taken out of context that sounds like one hell of a case of Delhi-belly!!

[athanasios]

Thanks a lot for clarification.

Now... my biggest question is: Is Noldo the blonde in that picture?

That would be impossible:
Noldo is in Finland, Venizelos airport is in Athens.
Unless we could fold space... too much SciFi!

[kilo.dollar]

(As it happens, between 7.30 and 8.30 this morning I moved 58 movements in 1hour )

The bottom line is, that was lots of $$$ Kilo Dollars.

[yoyo1505]

I know I'm a noob & all so this is probably impossible, but if coding for all the taxiing and stuff on modular airports is too much, is there some way of creating an interface that allows the player themselves to design the taxiing routes for each individual airport?

This could be a substitute for creating some enormous model that allows for every single eventuality in every single possible airport combination.

[richk67]

Standard answer no.1:

No. If there was any easy way of doing it, we would have done it a long time ago.

Airports are seductive... they look great and people say "I'd like to create one of those". But they are not all simple and easy... We (devs/support) would be perpetually bombarded with "my airport doesnt work, please sort it out"... or "there is a bug in airports" when its bad design.

Lots of support time, no reward. Bad payback.

[Benjamin]

A quick suggestion on the modular problem, why not make it possible to build a second airport adjacent to what ever sized airport you have already built?
All an "extension" to an airport like this would need is a terminal with a few gates and a runway.

I can see 2 problems:
-Biggest cosmetic problem I can see is the runway layout (ensuring the end of one runway isn't next to the start of another!).
But I suppose this can be sorted out by using a diagonal runway
-Second problem is the queuing/stacking sorting of planes waiting to land. I know from what I've read of other posts that each plane follows a sequence of steps. How or if this can work for lining up a plane at a players extension/new runway might cause problems as its location is changeable(set the plane to search for it as if it was a second airport?).

As far as I can see, it this eliminates a few problems
-You don't have to delete your exsisting airport
-You can expand the airport in a directioin of your choosing(i.e. wherever there is space)
-I'm taking a guess (a wild one at that) that if the stacking/queuing of planes waiting to land is do-able, then while on the ground, this extra terminal would otherwise work independently of the main airport

Go on people, tear it to shreds!

[DaleStan]

I won't bother. I'll let you tear it to shreds. Write the FSM for an airport. Any airport, I don't care which. Small would be a good one, since it's so simple. Then build another for one for that same airport, with an extra runway. Then explain, precisely, what changes you made, and how to generalize that to any airport, with any extra runway location.

[athanasios]

DaleStan: Please be a little bit patient. He is a newcomer. He will learn by time. If he doesn't ...

[Benjamin]

A subtle response from you there DaleStan, downloaded the code last night since your reply. Still gotta work out the coding (the last coding I did was for a BBC Micro about a good 10 years back!). I'll have a crack at it, it could take some time though (I could have sworn this was the suggestions forum ).

[DaleStan]

It is a suggestion forum. But some of us have limited tolerance for suggestions that have been made, in various and sundry forms, umpteen times before.

[Benjamin]

Time for my drunken reply:

Had a quick gander at your profile, you've been here 3 years. I've been reading these forums solidly for the past month to try and at least hit the ground running before joining last month. If you do any coding, then hats of to you, I can understand any knashing of teeth over every single suggestion on here (as with everything in life its a full circle where everything comes back around and you feel like your having to explain everything for the 60th time for someone new).

As can be guessed, I was hopeing for either some enthusiastic responses of why my suggestions would/would not work plus opinoins from long serving members like yourself. The response you gave me I would expect to see in the development section. All I want is a "rate it or slate it" response to my first post here. If/when I pick up the coding, I will then progress to the other forums.

Put plainly, we both have something in common here, a want to try and further and improve the gameplay. Work with me here please not against me.

[richk67]

Yeah, Ive seen Dalestan's style response on other bulletin boards by long standing members. Its normalish... even if the language is, shall we say, blunt.

On the topic, as OTTD-airports dev, I just dont think modular airports fly The biggest issue is time. Using all the fine control we have available in the current finite state machines, it still took me the best part of 6 hours today to refine the LaGuardia airport to the point where I was happy it didnt lock, and behaved correctly. Now this is just me refining it. That excludes the time making the original design, which went through about 3 generations before I was happy that the location of items was a workable solution.

To have any sort of build-it-yourself system would eat the attention of players getting the darn things to work safely. I just dont see it happening.

Now in some ways, I would be happy to be proved wrong. But somehow, unless there are a whole load of sado-masochists out there, I dont see anyone taking on the task of a self-coding, anti-locking, modular airport system.

What is coming... and soon, is a far more flexible way of adding new airports using a newgrf loading system. Packs of airports can be loaded as required. One of the first releases will be Real World Airports, with LaGuardia, Munich 2011, San Francisco, (and maybe Schiphol). The system is also flexible enough to allow seaplane airports... just need some seaplanes to land at them now!