Hi,
Since the addition of "make each day a separate route" I have been seven day scheduling as much as possible. I think it is also one of the most common ways to schedule and there are some things that could be added to make life a lot easier (and more fun)
One I already suggested, the ability to purchase slots from the manage routes screen, after checking the routes, for which you would like to buy slots.
Another one would be the ability to change the flight number of multiple routes at once (perhaps via a similar system).
But the one that made me bring this up is the addition of cargo. There should definitely be a "capacity management" option for multiple aircraft.
Check of one flight number/set of routes and be able to:
- Switch between pax & cargo, pax only and cargo only
- Block seats as desired
- Change the cargo class division
At this point it is a very tiring and boring job to perform these action. Still somewhat doable at the start of a GW, but once you have more than say 10 schedules (and in my case each schedule consists of 15 or so routes) it becomes impossible to make any significant changes, if you want to change all routes on my example you would have to go through a whopping 1050!! route edit pages! Insane!
Since I think most people use this scheduling tactic, I really feel this should have some priority...
Cheers,
NC
It would be nice to have ability to "group" the 7 individual flights (a separate option from just calling 7 flights the same flight number). By doing so, the player would lose ability to individually edit departure times, seat blocking etc. but player would regain ability to edit all 7 flights with familiar multiday flight interface.
So the checkmark: "Create each day as a separate route " would work as it currently does.
When checked, another checkmark would appear (be enabled to be clicked): "Manage separate routes as a group"
Then, all the options you requested would be available using existing simple interface.
So the only thing would need to change is a flag that a single day flight is part of 7 day group of flights. Creating new route would just add this flag.
Editing a flight with this flag would gather info from all the single day routes created, and bring us to multiday editing screen.
I guess it all comes down to how much time Sami wants to spend on this.
Though I am not an expert regarding the AWS systems, I would think your suggestion would be a more substantial change in the way the game "looks" at these flights.
Which ultimately would be better... But more time consuming to create...
Very welcome addition!
Quote from: NovemberCharlie on December 26, 2017, 10:33:27 AM
I guess it all comes down to how much time Sami wants to spend on this.
Though I am not an expert regarding the AWS systems, I would think your suggestion would be a more substantial change in the way the game "looks" at these flights.
Which ultimately would be better... But more time consuming to create...
Pretty much all of the items you requested already work in the User Interface of the multiday flights. So it seems to me the simplest way to implement all of the functionality is to change the procedure that populates the fields from databases for the multi-day UI and than the procedure to save the info after it has been edited. (at cost of some flexibility ungrouped flights offer, if one chooses to edit them as a group)
I guess it all depends on the priorities. I think this one is one of the simple items to implement, does not need a ton of deep thought like City Based Demand.
OTOH, with the City Based Demand working really well (IMO) for cargo the next 2 huge improvements in the system:
- City Based Demand for Passengers
- connectivity (of cargo and pax)
would make the system largely (big) feature complete. and seem within grasp.
Quote from: JumboShrimp on December 26, 2017, 10:06:21 AM
It would be nice to have ability to "group" the 7 individual flights (a separate option from just calling 7 flights the same flight number). By doing so, the player would lose ability to individually edit departure times, seat blocking etc. but player would regain ability to edit all 7 flights with familiar multiday flight interface.
So the checkmark: "Create each day as a separate route " would work as it currently does.
When checked, another checkmark would appear (be enabled to be clicked): "Manage separate routes as a group"
Then, all the options you requested would be available using existing simple interface.
So the only thing would need to change is a flag that a single day flight is part of 7 day group of flights. Creating new route would just add this flag.
Editing a flight with this flag would gather info from all the single day routes created, and bring us to multiday editing screen.
I do completely agree with the idea (as a matter of fact, I raised it 2 months ago or so :laugh: ) https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,73679.msg432074.html#msg432074 (https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,73679.msg432074.html#msg432074)
I just have one nuance to add: the option to group/degroup the 7 routes would always remain present in the "edit oute" page:
- "
degroup" would enable to separate them in case one slot is not available for one of the days
- "
regroup" would make the system look for the other routes with the same route number, no matter if the departure time is different
No idea about the cargo, though, as I didn't play it yet.
It could be part of a global enhancement of the managing tools for 7-day scheduling, without making it completely as easy as non-7-day scheduling (you want to have more efficiency, sure got to spend more time - but life-long editing is really boring)
https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,73679.msg432161.html#msg432161 (https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,73679.msg432161.html#msg432161)
And another proposal that could add with it:
https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,74775.0.html (https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,74775.0.html)
Personally I find 7 day scheduling unnecessary. The slight benefits it brings is not worth the aggravation, especially when changing fleet types.
Quote from: SAUR E. SAUR on December 30, 2017, 06:25:20 PM
Personally I find 7 day scheduling unnecessary. The slight benefits it brings is not worth the aggravation, especially when changing fleet types.
lol
mmmh, let's take an example. If you fly 737-700ER, you'll use them mainly for destinations between 3400NM & 4500NM. For destinations below 4000NM, you'll be able to schedule 7 flights per week, but only 6 for destinations above 4000NM. With a 7-7 schedule, you'll be able to fly both 7 times per week. You have 7 destinations, 3 of them are beyond the 4000N mark. With your 6 planes, you fly 49 times instead of 46 times. On such airplanes, fixed costs(staff, marketing, insurance, depreciation, maintenance) are typically half of the costs. Which means that for the 3 more flights, you pay only for half of the costs.
Said otherwise, your margin improves by 3%. Not much? But AWS is a game of margins!!!! Especially the 737-700ER is very hard to make profitable, and you desperately need those 3% for making the planes profitable. I mean, it's a competitive game. If you are 12% profitable, and your opponent 10%, on the long run, he will have a tough time to compete. Because more margin means better planes, better loans, better everything...and 10 years later you're at 15% margin and your opponent at 7%. So you can pound him even more, add more capacity, always better airframes. And his margin gets lower and lower, until he gives up. You did the extra effort for 2 points of margin, which on the long run gave you the edge for more points of margin, which themselves.....
Those 3% of margin a 7-7 schedule brings are often the difference between life and death. On the long run.
Oh I learned about the 737-700ER in a GW many years ago the hard way :'(
I don't BK (well except in my first long GW years ago), just get bored with the game in its final months (real life). I'm sure Jumbo will keep it interesting at JFK this time around :P
Quote from: SAUR E. SAUR on December 31, 2017, 09:26:23 PM
I'm sure Jumbo will keep it interesting at JFK this time around :P
This GW (and JFK) look like a lot of fun.
Considering how many people use 7-day scheduling, I'd like to see this taken even one step further and being naturally supported in the game.
One would be able to create one group schedule (all routes assigned to it would have to be flown daily) and then assign 7 planes to it. This shouldn't be that hard to do in terms of coding - system would just generate 7 different schedules (first with Day 1 being Monday, second with Day 1 being Tuesday, etc...) and assign them to particular aircraft.
(Even better option would be to allow creating schedules for longer or shorter periods, for example 2-day schedules or 10-days schedules. But this would be more complicated to code.)
Quote from: JumboShrimp on January 03, 2018, 05:59:45 PM
This GW (and JFK) look like a lot of fun.
First time trying out cargo. Never paid much attention to it until I saw the $ it can bring in. You made some good choices regarding the DC10/MD11 fleet type, especially for that MD11F model.
Quote from: SAUR E. SAUR on January 04, 2018, 02:35:51 PM
First time trying out cargo. Never paid much attention to it until I saw the $ it can bring in. You made some good choices regarding the DC10/MD11 fleet type, especially for that MD11F model.
Yeah, but I would not recommend MD-11F to a young airline though. It takes 100s of millions of losses before it becomes profitable (more than smaller cargo aircraft).
Oh no, definitely no MD-11F for me this GW.
I know how much money it takes to put a widebody pax jet in the air until it just breaks even.
Quote from: SAUR E. SAUR on January 05, 2018, 01:30:17 AM
Oh no, definitely no MD-11F for me this GW.
I know how much money it takes to put a widebody pax jet in the air until it just breaks even.
My first MD-11F started with a loss of 650k / week, before staff costs and other overhead (so likely 1m / week loss). If you don't want to lose money for a year it takes to build up RI, you can put some Route marketing on the routes (200k per destination for me). The financial performance improves extremely slowly until RI of some 90, and then it starts to improve fast. So RI 0 to 90 is pretty bad for a long time...
So a new airline flying MD-11F is not going to make it. New airlines flying smaller cargo aircraft have made it.
Thanks for providing some real figures. Yes, building RI is painfully slow and costly.
I don't think that having a feature like grouping is feasible. Too much work for the developers.
But a simpler join/split feature would be easy to implement and still very useful.
The join could work in this way:
Select the flights you want to join and choose the command from the drop down at the bottom of the page. Can be joined only equal routes with the only difference in scheduled day.
The split is just a button to split a single existing flight in multiple flights for the different selected days.
Of course the assignment of the flights to aircraft is lost and they must be rescheduled. But no other changes should be done to them.
Would be a great time saving in case of fleet migration.
Maybe there's a simpler way to do this without grouping/ungrouping 7-day schedules or losing any of the granularity of editing just Tuesday's flight.
Add more capabilities to the Manage Routes page. Here's what I mean by this:
You're on the route planning page of a particular route. You need to make some changes, so you click on a flight number. That takes you to the Manage Routes page with that flight number in the Search box, and you see all 7 flights. Currently for route pricing, you have two options: Edit them all as a group or individually. You click the "select all" box and go to the dropdown menu at the bottom. But route pricing is your only group editing option unless you want to unschedule or close the routes.
So add an option to that dropdown: Edit flights. This first brings up a warning box that says that any edits you make will apply to all selected flights, regardless of whatever options they currently have (including pricing). After dismissing the warning you are taken to the regular route-editing page with some indication at the top that you are editing multiple flights (and which ones). Days of the week are greyed out and cannot be edited as that is a "close route" or "open new route" function in the 7-day scheduling context, and may conflict with existing routes you are not editing in the case of not selecting all 7 routes.
The "Edit flights" option should only be available when a single flight number is displayed (so a maximum of 7 flights), or if the dropdown can't be dynamic then selecting it should display an error box if more than one flight number is selected, or simply be invalidated like the other options currently react when you have no flights selected.
Alternatively, things like "block seats" and other edits that could apply to multiple routes (i.e. NOT departure times/days or fleet group) could be added to the dropdown so you could do that to up to 50 flights at once. This could include a simple toggle option to enable/disable Cargo operations for all selected flights.
Ok, both ways have their advantages, but (I didn't thought about before), both also need previous actions (either "group/degroup" or "select all + edit").
So maybe (maybe...) the simpler and easiest way:
you take any route editing page, and check/uncheck a box saying "edit all routes with the same flight number". And that's all.
Box unavailable when "simple" scheduling has been initially used.
Quote from: Tha_Ape on January 07, 2018, 10:06:56 PMBox unavailable when "simple" scheduling has been initially used.
I'd say "box available only when at least another route with the same number exists", but
in fine, that's the same thing. I just love the idea.
I like both the solutions of Tha_Ape and Cardinal.
Anyway, in my opinion, the solution to group/ungroup similar flights is much simpler to implement. Just a couple of functions on the server, while the multiple edit solution require a redesign (internally at least) of the web page and all the function that save and retrive the flights.
Not needed with the new features that are in plans, rq closed.