Various suggestions regarding passenger numbers

[1993matias]

I'm kinda creative with these suggestions

I would like to suggest a whole new way in calculating passenger numbers, inspired by another suggestion.

Instead of having fixed numbers for the airports, we could make fixed numbers for the cities/areas served by the airport. Then the airport passenger numbers are calculated by flights, and the loadfactor is calculated by the city's population.

E.g., big cities in Africa have small airports, and small cities in US/Europe have big airports. This suggestion will bring more balance into the system, and you can see if the passenger number in the airport changes when you make routes to the airport.

And when runway lengths are implemented, you can rent a gate at a small airport for a small fee, and fly into a big city. But when you want to upgrade your planes to earn more money, you will have to switch to a bigger airport.

If possible, a negative factor to the loadfactor would be different parametres, e.g. distance to the city, size of airport, and make the bigger and more expensive airports more attracting.

This could also make possible a fixed number of gates for all airports (e.g. 50 or 75), and then the big cities would have more airports, with more gates per city in total.

It can be discussed what the "catchment area" of an airport is, but some airports near, e.g., Paris are so small, that only very small aircraft can land there (runway lengths).

If this suggestion comes into consideration, I will gladly research the city population numbers needed.

[Virgin Serbia]

I love that idea. Passenger numbers calculated by catchment area is wise. No more Gatwick - Heathrow routes then. It would also spread airlines out among other airports in the area, and make competition harder to predict than just "lower your ticket prices by €1".
Also the idea of passengers by airport is nice. LHR only has xxx passengers because of the airlines operating out of there.

But...
How to decide gate prices? By demand? By runway lengths/capacity for big planes?

It would also be nice if the airports had additional differences, such as different fuel prices etc.  Naturally an airport like LHR would not have av fuel for piston powered planes, only Jet A, while Le Bourget or Luton would both have it. That would give more dynamics in operation.

[StephenM]

Gate fee's in their current format will ideally disappear. We already have airport related costs for landing and parking, as well as passenger handling (In the misc. operating cost). The reason why we haven't removed the gate costs, and also to some extent kept maintenance the way it is for so long, is that the total expenses for airlines in AM is still relatively low compared to real world situations. I'd like to see real world airport charges, or atleast influenced charges as currently they are related to the gate fee and are very flat. Having expensive and cheap airports to operate into, close to the same market would make things more interesting.

In some regards we could do runway lengths if a generic formula was used for calculating the takeoff/landing length. We have all the runway data already thankfully.

[Virgin Serbia]

In some regards we could do runway lengths if a generic formula was used for calculating the takeoff/landing length. We have all the runway data already thankfully.

What do you mean? Isn't it as simple as saying an A320 can take of from a runway xxxx meters long, so if the runway is shorter it is a no-go? You really don't need to go all the way and simulate actual aircraft performance with 50% load and 25% fuel.

[StephenM]

What I mean is we have 986 aircraft in the database with no runway length information. A generic formula can be used to calculate roughly what runway length they require (Similar to fuel flow) which can then be updated with actual data if and when we get it.

[1993matias]

Hmm.... I'd like to hear your opinion to my suggestion though.


Regarding the formula, I think you can calculate the longest flight possible, with maximum passengers, and "reverse" the fuel flow to know how much fuel is needed.

The empty-weight would probably be on the internet, same place where you found the other data.

[StephenM]

The empty-weight would probably be on the internet, same place where you found the other data.

We didn't use the internet to gather data, it was done painstakingly by hand by our admins from another central source.