Passengers not showing up at airport

Hello,

I have an issue with no passengers showing up at the airport for a few random flights (not all!).

I encountered this after opening an extension of the terminal (two seperate security checkpoints within one security zone). The gates are well connected and public transport has no queues.

Does someone know why passengers do not show up at the airport?

Thank you!

Printscreens pls!, with zones enabled.

And if possible, at daytime :slight_smile:

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Anyone?

You’re lacking way way to few bus stands and subways stations for an airport with that many gates. That’s why they are not arriving I’d wager.

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Rubble is correct.

Let me explain how buses work:

Every single bus stop has a bus rotating on a predetermined schedule, regardless of whether there are any passengers or not.
Although the buses can cruise empty, they cannot exceed their maximum passenger capacity.

The issue might be that there aren’t enough buses cruising to supply enough PAX quickly enough. The only way to add more buses is to add more bus stops.

Be aware, however, that bus traffic might also become an issue, especially if you do not space your bus stops correctly. Buses ALWAYS come at predetermined schedule, regardless of whether the previous bus vacated the stop or not, which is caused by inefficient airport layout, as a bus will NOT leave until all assigned PAX are inside and will wait for the ones on the other side of the terminal.

Alternatively, stick a metro entrance - it should alleviate the situation.

Car stops are inefficient in terms of capacity, but they add to realism.

Thank you for your help! I will try your suggestions.

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We should have a “MAX transport capacity” sign somewhere in Operations menu, and a diagram with “transport capacity usage”.

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I don’t think it is that simple. Transport capacity in numbers would give you Max amount of PAX capacity at once. There are other that may have far bigger impact on your passenger supply like efficiency of your road system or distance to check in, security gate, luggage claim etc.

It not just about your capacity to supply PAX to the airport. Some buses take longer to reach their stop, some come at different intervals. The raw stat would not help

Your point is a valid one, however, at this moment we have no indication at all.

While I agree, such indication would be less than useful and would likely confuse people who would then proceed to say “why if I have such big capacity, my PAX is still late for boarding - this game sux” or other nonsense like this.

When you introduce new metrics you MUST be as confident as possible that they will work as intended. I am very much not confident about this one at this stage in development.

Not to mention, that if any changes to traffic collision/pathing is introduced, that metric value will change from confusing to probably confusing again. And there will be changes…

Your current capacity indicator of sorts is the number of bus stops - and it’s a very simple one. More is better.

Why would you want to dilute this and then calculate number of stops x bus capacity / mean of individual stop schedule patterns (which you can’t see anyway) / average traveling time through the terminal roads?

The game has lots of information currently that has no value at all, or numbers that are not logically to explain, or have any management value. I think people will manage, some examples;

  • a “hourly” income notice, what is no weighted averaged over time, but instant; so has no value at all. I.e; if you create a loan, is says +1mil for that hour!
  • staff task and vehicle task request in operations that is resolving in no-time, since the operations menu only shows instant request. You have no task history or intensity graph where it shows the usage statistics over time; you as a CEO cannot manage the staff groups or vehicle fleet due to lack of information.
  • bank-loans that have no relation to turnover, they are just “made up”, so you can not leverage your growth at all.
  • the airport has “happiness” indicators without any background on any of the measurements going into those indicators. As a CEO these indicators are not creating any management information.
  • when you “grow” your airport, report for repairs are not delayed at all, so, by the time the task is reported, its already picked up by a repairman, he or she is just still on his way.
  • stand management information is the same for all stands, and you cannot manage any error-reporting on them. So, if you would have a “walk to” stand, on the other end of the field with a walking path that takes ages, you can nowhere manage the flags of that stand. It will just overload you with useless warnings.
  • efficiency numbers on security stations are instant; it is current information, again; no weighted average or histogram of this information; let alone an airport wide indicator.

Hi Rubble,

A while ago you advised me to build more bus stops and subway stations, in order to allow passengers to arrive at the airport. Unfortunately that did not solve the problem. Still most planes leave, or arrive without passengers.

I attached some screenshots of the airport with the new bus stops and subway stations.

Do you have any other clue what the issue is causing?

Thanks a lot!

Do you have AUTO SEND AWAY enabled in your Flight Planner?

Put it on manual and check why your planes are delaying and send away without their PAX.

The stand ID will tell you which stands have issues.

Look what is causing the delay for each stand. Then solve the issue from there.

For that many stands I’d have at least eight subway stations. I can only see two I think? I’d slight reduce the number of bus stops too.

The flight process monitor does show problems with flights gettign passengers assigned. Little weir to have 0 passengers assigned. Does the problem continue when you use the game’s original airlines? I think it’s mod related.

Thank you for your help!
I just did as you said and checked if there was something related to delays. Even without delays, the planes arrive and depart without passengers. The gates of these flights are random: sometimes planes with passengers and sometimes without (e.g. B9).
Something which makes me question if it has something to do with my infrastructure, is that these flights are also arriving without passengers. It is very peculiar!

Thanks for your reply. As a test I build 18 (!!) subway stations. Other then that my passenger number increased by 10.000, the empty flights issue persists.

When a plane is “dismissed” before the boarding starts, it is assigned a zero count. So, if the auto-send-away function is enabled, you get lots and lots of refused PAX.

We really need custom rules for “dismissing” planes, I would like to auto-dismiss planes that are 90% filled with PAX at the moment of the delay reporting by the engine. That would solve 80% of my delay warnings.

Other warnings I want to see, so I can solve problems on the ground, now I dont after a certain airport size, since you make money anyway on the PAX that do board, and the PAX numbers that shop.

Stand related service bugs are not apparent from the point you auto-dismiss planes that are delayed. But without auto-dismissing, you never get 5 star shops, so, you as CEO have no choice.

Thus, bigger airports have planes that are dismissed all the time, due to 2 factors; you cant dismiss on rules, so you dismiss on the default “hour delay” category. And secondly, since you auto-dismiss on time, you have no way of detecting service defects on stand level.

The result; planes leaving with 0 PAX on board all the time, on stands that are difficult to reach measured in TAXI-TIME from runway to stand, since on arriving, its auto-dismissed instantly by the engine setting “dismiss delayed flights”.

For me, these factors make running big airport very repetitive. From a certain size you are just extending assets, in stead of managing an airport decently.


Things that would help to resolve this;

  • Stand specific delay timer value setting (1h, 2h, etc)
  • Stands that can be assigned to runways
  • Stands that have a “route” setting for planes that are on approach, or want to leave a stand.
  • Taxi blocks, where the taxi-route is between blocks/boxes, on the route assigned. So, no longer 1 plane having 8 to 12 planes waiting on it. (see Smart Signals from OpenTTD as example)
  • Rules for “auto-dismissing”, based on other values as “time-delay”.
  • Couple depots to stands, in stead of vehicle*, you want to create “service domains” for vehicles. Certain parts of your airport serviced by a particular vehicle.
  • “service domains” for staff would also provide economic choices, that cannot be made atm, you just over-hire to compensate for long distance staff calls. Same with hiring double staff amounts on security stations, since staff syncing on them required you to work with the double amount due to instant parallel shift changes.**
  • Auto-flight planner template option.

'* assigning vehicles to stands still makes no sense to me, economically it is not interesting at all to optimize your fleet. You just ramp up your numbers the moment you start gushing cash.
'** same for staff.

Your advise worked out :smile: !

I canceled all the mod-flights and restarted with the original airlines.

I do not know if it has something to do with the mod or if my flights got bugged somehow.

Anyway, thank you very much!

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