Dev Blog 153: Emergencies!

Few questions about emergencies…

Emergency Stands

  • If keeping a stand spare for emergencies, do we still need to have all the usual connected services to avoid error messages? such as attaching boarding desks? If it’s a remote stand, we need to attach a desk to an airside bus bay don’t we?
  • Are the emergency arrivals specific to Domestic/International?
  • Reason i ask above, if you have a domestic and international network in an airport with small and medium stands, would you currently need to have 2 small and 2 medium available stands (a domestic and international of each) to sufficiently handle any emergency landing requests? That isn’t an issue, as I appreciate this is a pre-release and the wonderful emergency update is still being worked on, I ask to get an understanding before activating emergencies in some pre-emergency update airport builds :slight_smile:

Security Rounds

  • When drawing the routes, does it matter how many points you click along the route? or is it a case of does a car/person walk in that area to ensure it’s inspected? Any key hints and tips on the routing feature?

Hangars

  • If you have say 10 medium stands, how many medium hangars is sensible?

Apologies if some of these have been answered, I couldn’t spot them on a few quick forum searches but I have found some great tips already so thank you in advance for any advice on the above :slight_smile:

I found with high incidents, two hangers got me mostly by with 12 medium stands. There were times though when that was not enough, but emergencies were cranked to 11. YMMV.

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I prefer to research into Large planes, before building medium stands and immediately double purpose the large hangers, since they also can fit Medium Planes. Since you can have max 5 incidents, 3 large repair hangers will mostly cover all large and medium incidents.

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If we don’t attach gate desks or bus stops, the gate wouldn’t be declared as functional gate and won’t appear in the flight planner. So the answer is yes, it’s required.

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Thanks that was my thinking but was not sure if emergencies overlook that.

I seen somewhere devs considering a toggle switch to reserve a stand for emergencies maybe this could mean not needing to attach services relating to departures :slight_smile:

IMO I think it’s fair if the emergency stands still need to be connected. Some of the emergencies AFAIK requires pax (and baggage) to deboard the plane.

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For the very reason ReV0LT says, this is not a suitable solution. It would mean that we would have to differentiate between emergency types and at that point we get down to some really specific stand matchamaking stuff that can impose a wide array of different issues.

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Can you make use of the airlines list on a stand, so we can make “Emergency” as the airline only allowed on that stand?

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Could there be implemented a feature to make better use for the stands we basically build just for emergencies - i.e. standby stands? This way if a departure from some standard stand is delayed for any reason, the following arrival scheduled on the same stand wouldn’t need to be delayed but its “delay” dialog could use an option to assign another stand the emergency way.

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Hey there,
I am currently at the default branch with the latest Alpha version published there. I managed to increase the difficult setting, so I get Emergencys now. But unfortunally when I build hangars and get an emergency requiring mainanance, the plane is stucking at the gate; it tells me no suitable hangar reacheable. Any way to avoid this problem?

Understand and agree, but it was this comment that made me ask about it :slight_smile: a way to have a stand available to an emergency landing aircraft and to offload the pax and bags, then it I think goes to the hangar before departing the airport empty?

As part of that, i think do we still need to build connected boarding desks and things like that to allow it to be available to assign the actual emergency to it even though the desks are not used? :slight_smile: I dont know, I am just trying to understand it better how best to use the stands.

I normally use such a spare stand as an overflow, but just a thought if this is the way it works.

Thanks

Perhaps a “remote” stand emergency operations area with all necessary vehicles on site and a place to offload them at the airport??? I have never fully figured out remote stands though. They just don’t work in my brain, but when I look at maps of European airports… big birds off loading people down stair trucks. That’s weird to see in the US.

Lol, you have maybe less regulations, less costs and more space to build airports with terminals. Here we can be happy if we get the ok for a new parking lot.

In Frankfurt, (in past times) even A380 get served by remote busses.

I noticed that. I do love Frankfurt! Interesting you mention Frankfurt, because what’s left of Rhein Main air base is all sorts of construction. We do have some advantages here, but when I look at DeGaul… the French know how to make airplane parking look like a finger painting project. It’s actually really fascinating.

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Didn’t see this mentioned, but getting an emergency and being fined $25,000 before you even have time to research a fire truck is quite a bit unfair, and unrealistic. You don’t really need to research a fire truck. Just saying, you should be able to buy a fire truck and store it in your parking lot until you have the full set up so you aren’t fined just because you didn’t get the full research track in time.

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I’d love if there was a tiny fire station and a small fire truck, which could only extinguish small planes. If this was avaliable from the start, it could respond to emergency GA landings while you research improved emergency units.

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I even wonder, at what size of an airport you have to have them mandatory!? I cannot imagine a small GA airfield having to have a firefighter team at ready. Usually, the muncipal firefighters come for this and I cannot see, why YOU should be fined at all for that. Is it the fault of the airport that an emergency landing has happened? I like this specific feature of the game even less now. As I am told, I can switch emergencies off and it seems that this will be the way I will play the game until this is somewhat straightened out.

Obviously it’s very difficult to tailor this part of the game to how it is in real life, our decision to enforce emergency response units is based on the gameplay pace. Emergencies only spawn if you have a commercial license, meaning that with the privilege of moving persons comes the responsibility of handling emergencies.

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The first thing I research is that. I only start building the commercial wing by the time this is done. So I think that what is portrayed here should be inplamented.

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I guess a closer look at the ICAO guidelines could help here and might lead to a solution. Annex 14 states, what the prerequisites are. Now…as stated somewhere else, the game intends to be a tycoon game, not a simulation so we should not take these literally. From what I see the ICAO defines some danger levels depending on the type of plane and this goes from 1-10. Level 1 being planes up to 9m body length and things like an A380 are a 10. Basically it says that help must be given within 3 minutes and the danger level somewhat translates into how many people might be in need of rescue. The bigger the plane the more obviously. And this is translated into requirements in fire cars and their ability to extinguish fires.

In ACEO we have GA/small commercial, then medium and then large planes so having a level of I-III might be simulatoristic enough but not too complicated. The game just checks what stands you offer and then requires you to build the proper infrastructure by informing you via e-mail or denying opening the stand unless you have the proper number of fire cars at hand.
No research here as this seems to be one of the basic requirements of operating an airport at all. The tutorial should reflect this and urge you to at least have a shack with a fire car in it or have one mandatory before opening the airport. I can understand people getting angry, when the game whacks them with random events and they even had no chance in avoiding it like hitting them while they research it.

So solution: do not research fire engines and make them mandatory from the beginning of the game once you open the airport. Maybe you will get the first fire engine for free as it is a muncipal one - just have a parking lot ready so you obey the ICAO standards. The bigger the birds you want to land there, the better your infrastructure will be.

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