Loadfactor Suggestion

[anthonyyel]

I understand that that work is being done to the loadfactor calculation to make it more realistic, and I have some suggestions to make.

I assume the current way of determining loadfactor is a combination of the amount of passengers that go through each airport, distance, the competition and the amount of seats in the aeroplane [and maybe some other things].  Now that cities are included in the game (even though they are used for anything except clarification) I believe that a different city based system can be used to determine Loadfactor

In real life a passenger buys a ticket they buy tickets to a city, what airport they land at depends solely on the airline itself, this makes competition not airport based but city based. When the loadfactor gets determined it should take into account the following factors:

 - The amount of passengers who fly to the city (ie. for London; passengers for Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton added together)
 - The airlines who fly between each city

Still including all other factors (still including the amount of passengers that fly to that particular airport) adding these two other factors would simultaneously increase; competition, profit, options and help out smaller airlines.

ie. competition would be increased because now you will be competing with every airline in the city, profit because you would service a greater no. of people, options because you could fly to a cheaper airport but still benefit by flying to a large city (the same way Ryanair "flies" to Paris yet drops its passengers off at Beauvais - Tillé) that would of course help out smaller airlines.

Of course if its too complicated to put into the game I understand I just wanted to get the idea out there (unless of course someone has already thought of it)

And I don't think I've thought through it completely so suggestions to improve the suggestion are much appreciated

[StephenM]

Its definately something we would like to do. However we would still have to do the research to get the data for each town/city in order to make it work that way. That could take quite some time.

[CHR]

Could you do something automatically, whereby airports can affect those nearby? Airports don't necessarily need to be in the same town to steal pax. from each other. I imagine some kind of script would take into account the size of each airport (larger airports having more effect) and the distance (where the effect of an airport diminishes with distance away). This would mean the effects of large airports could be felt further away.
It would work so that flights originating from AND going to the same area can affect the LF of nearby routes. It could be as simple as adding the extra distance between the airports at either end. i.e. if my route is from Gatwick > Orly, to calculate the extra distance component from a Heathrow > CDG route, you would add the distance between Heathrow and Gatwick to the distance between Orly and CDG.
It's a pretty simple idea as to how the end product would work, but I imagine that it could be quite difficult to code and be server intensive (with every route affecting those at least fairly nearby).

[nwadeltaboy]

This is a good idea, except it would be difficult to take into account airports like EWR and JFK, which are in two seperate states let alone cities. Maybe a distance-based thing would work a bit better.

[Vampyre]

Nice idea, but IF class is added then you are looking at a whole different dimension as well.  Some place may have a higher or lower  number of 1st class, business class or economy class passengers, also load factors for planes would need to display for each class type for the aircraft as well as it's combined total, which could be done right now under the current system i think, as well as per airport.  We already know the number of possible passengers at each city - just need to see if that can be calculated into class type with a fluctuation on that which would allow for economy changes with int he city/country, if a city hits harder times then you will see a boost in economy flights - everyone loves a bargain, but when the economy is good then the luxury of 1st class will be affordable - this gives a 2nd challenge of the price structure and would also allow for more choice on airline type - budget airlines to executive travel, if you set yourself up as a budget airline could you attract high paying fares if you put in 1st class flights?  Your airline is your brand, once others know your a no frills budget airway just how hard would it be to fill a plane for 1st class and business?  Of course having this aspect in game would allow more better or different use of small fast planes which could be fitted out as 1st class/business only planes which could also have a knock on effect to the carry all airlines, but pick up the slack from the budget airline routes.