Generic aircraft schedules

[wilian.souza2]

Route pre - planning in AWS is currently limited to pre-planning of separate routes without slots for the airports, and the only way to check how they will fit in an airplane's schedule is to order 1 aircraft and wait until 3 weeks prior its delivery to do the planning. This is OK if you are making simple scheduling (= no separate routes for each day), but what if you are planning to open some longhaul routes with aircraft you haven't ordered yet, or you want to open a new base and need to get everything ready at the time the aircraft are delivered there, or you simply want to switch schedules between operative aircraft?

That's why I thought about the possibility of creating multiple generic schedules, which are schedules that don't belong to any aircraft but could be very useful to make advanced route planning and ultimately to find out how many aircraft you should order to supply those routes. You could think about them as virtual aircraft as well (this term is a bit redundant since all our AWS aircraft are virtual...  )

So, with generic schedules you could:
- Pre-plan any kind of complex routing before ordering any aircraft, and after you order them, thansfer each of the generic schedules you created to each new aircraft going be delivered soon;

- swap schedules between operative aircraft: without generic schedules you need to clear the schedule of the aircraft going to receive the other aircraft's schedule (plane A), transfer the other aircraft's schedule (plane B) to plane A, and then manually add the maintenance checks and flights cleared from plane A to plane B. Seems simple, but sometimes the cleared flights get mixed with other flights you've left behind on your route planning and makes the last step become a trouble until you find which flights are to be added on the aircraft schedule. With generic schedules swapping is way more simple: transfer plane A to generic, plane B to plane A, then generic to plane B. No manual adding of maintenance checks, no complication!

[JumboShrimp]

I wrote something similar a while ago, when Feature Request forum was locked, so it is stuck in General Forum:

"Name schedules, not aircraft, Aircraft pools"
https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,54631.0.html

Basically, proposes Schedules to be independent entities, and Aircraft as something that gets assigned to them (either manually or dynamically from an aircraft pool)

[MikeS]

took me a bit to grasp your idea  . You are asking for a separate page of "Scheduling" where you can add any aircraft model and play
through some scheduling ideas.
I guess many of us do that with pen & paper  , It probably could be done, however the value of it is severely limited when operating from
slot constrained airports. The availability of morning departures will keep changing and force rescheduling until slots are actually bought.

In your last part you mentioned swapping. This is something missing at the moment. There was an old thread on it but it never materialized.
It should be possible to swap the schedules of two identical aircraft without having to clear one then move the other over .... This is needed when
different seating configurations exist on identical aircraft. (I find myself sometimes re configuring an aircraft instead of swapping out of pure laziness  )

Cheers!

[wilian.souza2]

I wrote something similar a while ago, when Feature Request forum was locked, so it is stuck in General Forum:

"Name schedules, not aircraft, Aircraft pools"
https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,54631.0.html

Basically, proposes Schedules to be independent entities, and Aircraft as something that gets assigned to them (either manually or dynamically from an aircraft pool)

I read that and found it fantastic, even more advanced than my idea, which was to just allow us create as many generic schedules as we wanted to assign them to any aircraft later, without the feature of pools which would help substitute aircraft out for maintenance.

took me a bit to grasp your idea  . You are asking for a separate page of "Scheduling" where you can add any aircraft model and play
through some scheduling ideas.
I guess many of us do that with pen & paper  , It probably could be done, however the value of it is severely limited when operating from
slot constrained airports. The availability of morning departures will keep changing and force rescheduling until slots are actually bought.

In your last part you mentioned swapping. This is something missing at the moment. There was an old thread on it but it never materialized.
It should be possible to swap the schedules of two identical aircraft without having to clear one then move the other over .... This is needed when
different seating configurations exist on identical aircraft. (I find myself sometimes re configuring an aircraft instead of swapping out of pure laziness  )

It would not necessarily require a separate page for generic schedules. They would be in each bases' Scheduling page, above all other fleetgroup schedules. By default it would be presented with an empty schedule line with a "create new generic schedule" link, and at each click, more schedule lines would be created and the last line would be always the one with the "create new generic schedule" command. The schedule lines would be equal to the normal aircraft schedules, with similar commands (add route, add maint. check, move schedule); the exception would be the "clear schedule command", that would be instead "delete generic schedule".

Also, generic schedules don't necessarily belong to a specific fleetgroup; you could assign them to any aircraft because aircraft schedules and generic schedules would be independent entities, just like in JumboShrimp's idea. Take as an example a situation which, with generic schedule system implemented, you tried to assign a schedule you designed for an ERJ to a 747: the system would send you an error message saying that it could not assign that schedule to it due to payload/range, runway requirement, turnaround etc.

Pen and paper is another option, but you'll still need AWS to calculate route times for you and it doesn't help you assign a number of routes for a certain group of aircraft. You will still need to manually schedule each aircraft that is made available soon before their delivery, which may be very complicated if the routes are separated for each day. With generic schedules you can, for example, schedule routes for a group of 10 aircraft at once, and after that you'll only have the work of assigning them to each aircraft going to be delivered.

The purpose of generic schedules is not to deal with slot availability, only to help mount schedules for your aircraft. And yes, generic schedules would help swapping schedules between aircraft!