Well, as with most things aviation (and the FAA) there is not a simple answer as it depends on the runway and the surrounding geography. If the runway has an ILS installed, the PAPI should be installed so the glideslope depicted is a close to the one provided by the ILS. This is not always possible and many PAPIs are not coincident to the ILS glideslope. In other installations, the position will be adjusted further down the runway to provide a proper threshold crossing height or obstacle clearance.
The short answer, generally it is installed about 1000’ from the approach end threshold of the runway but its common to see it as far as 1500’ from the approach threshold.
I feel like, but the developers obviously know more about this, that it is because after a “job” a service vehicle always completes it’s task by returning to a service road. The service vehicle, in this case a Pushback, will then have to drive back to the stand but despite being right next to it has to drive all the way to the end of a section to “turn around”.
I have seen this “turning around” behaviour a lot with vehicles driving all the way to the end of a pre-built road to the other side of the map, just to turn around.
It would be super duper awesome if “manouvering on stand” would be part of the regular infrastructural system instead of the job task, because then presumably it would also be possible for a service vehicle to enter a stand from different sides and cross empty stands. I just fear that this would require an extensive rework of the system that is probably not worth it at the moment.
Thanks, I fully agree, this probably is the explanation, perhaps devs could confirm…
If so, we are coming back to already widely discussed issues of vehicles behaviour/pathfinding…
Just trying to get rid of dealys-causing traffic jams, leading to traffic nodes like this:
Still observing this pathfinding issue:
pax/staff walking to an escalator, going up/down, just to directly go back up/down and then walking into another direction.
Looks like ‘just want to see what’s at the end of this escalator → ah, not my correct path → let’s go back and try it anywhere else’.
Watcing vehicles move around, they don’t seem to be able to turn left into a side road (in other words, turn left across a lane of road in order to proceed down a road branching off the side of the road they are on) - they prefer to go all the way to the end of the road they are currently on and turn around so they can turn right into the same side road when appraoching from the opposite direction.
I can only assume it’s an easter egg and the developers are Zoolander fans:
Vehicles not turning left or right to cross over to the other side of the street is an on-going discussion for a longer time already. I sometimes bypass the ‘issue’ by placing 1 block side roads to give the vehicles a place to turn, but that’s not solving the issue. It’s not a direct bug but would make logistics a lot ‘easier’. Maybe something to add to the feature list and see if people agree by voting for it
@sirhc80 If you see this happening a lot and also after a save and reload, please file an in-game bug report for it, same counts for others who see this happen.
Might be an obvious or stupid question, but is there any way to limit stands to individual / specific runways?
I’ve included a picture to help explain. I’m using these remote stands in the bottom right and want to keep flights using those stands to only use the runway on the right (36R). Instead, what often happens is they use 36L, take a long time to taxi (tying up routes for other planes), and it is a domino effect of issues.
I suppose if it’s not possible right now, I’d be curious if that’s something worth implementing. At least some control over ground pathing would be useful, I think. I have seen planes sit and wait at a junction for hours (in-game time) while the plane they are waiting for isn’t even close to crossing their path.
No difference to some real airports like PVG where you always start / land on the runway on the opposite of the designated terminal. Around 20min driving on ground and waiting for planes crossing are normal.
AFAIK it is supported by the ATCT that if you connect stands to a specific runway it only lands/take off flights for those stands. Should also work if you have multiple runways connected because you want to separate landing and take-off. It has been supported in the past, try it and let us know of it still works
