In one of my airports I have an issue with massive delayed flights, probably because of the new ‘auto schedule’ option. With that a big crowd of passengers (around 1000 - 1500) just standing all in one place on the airport with ZZZ balloons over their head. I tried to get the passengers away by closing the airport, no result, cancelling all flights, no results, cancelling the contracts with airliners (as much as possible), no result, deleting the building around them, no result. So these people just hang around and do nothing, no eating, no toilet, nothing. They are probably just there because they missed their flight or because the flight never came in.
Because of this I closed the airport and after a while (trying all the other stuff) I decided to open the airport again. But the strange thing is that even though no flights are scheduled, planes (small and medium size) still come in. What I noticed is that if a plane lands, gets to the stand and you click on it, it shows the passengers ‘attached’ to it and strangely enough that sometimes also included passengers in the waiting pack…
So based on that I decided to re-build the airport again where all the passengers are just waiting and standing around (I had demolished that piece of airport to try and get these people of the airport), so they could board the planes. With that the other strange thing happened that all the waiting passengers moved when I placed the airport foundation tiles… Unfortunately their path finding system didn’t reset, because they just moved (through walls and zones) to the main entrance hall and are all waiting there in the same state now.
So two things happened in my case, when an airport has massive delays (in my case I think because of the auto schedule option and the ‘always delay’ option on) passengers don’t know what to do anymore and all pile up in one place just standing there and waiting. And the other thing is that even when no flights are scheduled, planes still land, go to the stand, unload passengers and luggage and try to board people and baggage, which doesn’t happen or only partly (which is also strange). Also the boarding stands do not state that there is a flight scheduled.
On one of the images you can see the boarding desk selected and showing no flight scheduled, a plane in the medium stand selected and people connected to that plane. This plane was not scheduled, probably a plane that was scheduled somewhere in the past, but there is still some kind of connection in the database. The passengers that are connected do not move in any way, so they don’t seem to know that they should be on that plane.
Where are the Security Checkpoints? I don’t see them in the images. Perhaps they are out of frame at the top?
Without Security Checkpoints, passengers cannot enter Secure Zones to get to gates.
Sidebar: as you grow your airport larger, you’ll need to increase the length of the Check-in queues dramatically.
Security checkpoints are indeed at the top of the airport (see screenshot with security zones on) and the security zones are correct, I’m sure that is not the issue. The passengers just don’t know what to do as they probably don’t have a path in the DB anymore.
Maybe good to mention, all these passengers came through check-in and security and all went to the lowest left room where the medium stands are. They were ‘stuck’ or waiting all in that room and moved after I deleted that area and placed a new airport foundation. After I placed the new foundation all these people moved to the room above which is the central entrance area. All the passengers have tickets and their baggage have been checked in as well. I don’t have a save game of the period around the demolition and re-build of that part of the terminal, unfortunately.
See the screenshots for the pathfinder info from the debug menu
The 2nd picture is after 5 mins of running on normal speed after loading the save game, you can see that all figures are a bit higher. The ‘queue count’ fluctuates between 0 and 10.
In addition, when I set the speed to double/triple speed the ‘queue count’ boosts up to 560 and then goes down again and stabilises around 390 - 430. When I change to normal speed it goes all the way down to 0 - 8 again. A second run of higher speed boosts the ‘queue count’ to around 270 instead of the earlier around 400.
I have put some time in this save game again last night and as @jasperwillem stated earlier, the passengers eventually went away After deleting all the flights I kept the airport running for a while and eventually the small stands ‘ghost’ flights stopped coming in and for the medium stands at some point only 1 plane kept coming in. Somehow every time a plane left, or after I dismissed the plane, the passenger count on my airport got a bit less and in the end levelled around 90 passengers in the dashboard overview. I’ve tried to search for these passengers but could not really find them, as the airport was nearly empty. After some re-modelling of vehicle/fuel depots and assigning trucks, I decided to start the automated flight planner again and see what happens. The automated flight planner immediately planned a full day and week of flights, so that was a good test to see if the same delay issue would happen again. With the trucks being closer to the stands, the turnaround time went down drastically which resulted in all green boxes in the flight planner. Also the ‘ghost’ planes disappeared and now only scheduled flights came in.
Looking back at what happened I think it’s a combination of 95% ignorance/noobness on my side (this was the 1st airport I built) and 5% possible bug/(odd) behaviour of the engine:
Lessons learned:
Not the most efficient walk way on the airport (long walks for passengers and personnel) (WIP)
Not the most efficient drive path for the trucks (service roads too wide, too long) (done)
Build more and logical placed vehicle/fuel depots (done)
Assign trucks to depots (thanks @jasperwillem for this tip in another thread) (done)
Due to the above the planes turnaround time was way too long, causing the massive delays and piling up passengers.
When there are a massive amount of flights delayed (talking about multiple days here) it looks like the game engine still keeps track of these delayed flights and doesn’t remove them from the ‘still to be coming in/to be handled’ database list. This results in ‘ghost’ flights coming in (even when there are none flights scheduled) and passengers piling up on the airport because they don’t know what to do. After deleting all flights in the planner the ‘ghost’ planes still land and do a turnaround, also with some odd behaviour. As said above, the passengers eventually seem to find their path and are gone from the airport and the ghost planes almost come to a stop. I didn’t wait for it to stop completely but started the scheduling again and that didn’t cause (for now) the same or other issues.
Possible bug/(odd) behaviour:
Delayed flights seem to be kept in the database, even after days of delay
When flights are still scheduled, the delayed flights also keep coming in delaying the scheduled flights even more. In my case this resulted in flights being delayed for multiple days
After cancelling all flights the game seems to clean up the database by sending in ‘ghost’ planes
Passengers pile up because of the delays
Passengers do not leave the airport when the plane doesn’t arrive that day
Development ideas:
Overview of delayed flights in a list including when they were originally scheduled
Option to (automated option) do something with delayed flights longer than a day (cancel and take the financial/reputation hit, reschedule, remove, etc) (I know you can do this with scheduled flights in the flight planner, but when the day has ended you cannot see the ‘old’ flights anymore, resulting in flights you cannot control)
When a flight is cancelled/rescheduled/removed send the passengers away from the airport
Option to (automated option) send passengers away (also debug menu didn’t help in this) who are just hanging around
Option to (automated option) assign passengers to another flight
Apologies for the long post , kuddos who made it to this line
1b) Secondly, did you set the “empty” block time in your auto-scheduler on a decent long length? I have it set on 2hrs always and then set the “delay” function on manual to spot troubled stands.
2.) When you use the manual selector, you can turn away flights to get your airport back on track.
3.) They do most probably, but create extra path finder queuing and will put extra pressure on your bus-stops, make sure to have enough bus stops to extract peak time queues.
4.) I send you my bank details in a private note, will see the reward coming.
@dallas Tried that and nothing happened at that point with the waiting people. It looked like that at some point the system cleaned the queue of delayed flights in it’s database and with that also the passengers initially left. The debug menu action maybe have helped with that as well, I don’t know.
1a) Yes I did, but do these people still count as visiting passengers?
1b) The auto-scheduler is on 20 mins, but AFAIK was at 15 mins at the time of the delays. Normally, also on my big airport, the 20 mins is fine, but I can try a higher number to see what happens.
I know you can turn away flights, but what happens to the waiting passengers that actually want to get on the plane? All the delays happened because I kept the airport running and was just building stuff not paying attention to the flights and schedules, until I saw a huge amount of people just standing around all in the same spot and it was lagging like hell. Then I started looking into the issue and found out that planes were massively delayed.
I have around 4-6 bus stops I believe, but can definitely look into that
yes, bus stop passengers still count as passengers, and I do like 2hrs
I have no idea, I never cared, haha! and I generally have no delays, until that one time I had a runway in disrepair and the game was running in the background, haha.
How about 1 bus stop for a small stand, 2 for each big one?
After deleting all the flights I kept the airport running for a while and eventually the small stands ‘ghost’ flights stopped coming in and for the medium stands at some point only 1 plane kept coming in. Somehow every time a plane left, or after I dismissed the plane, the passenger count on my airport got a bit less and in the end levelled around 90 passengers in the dashboard overview. I’ve tried to search for these passengers but could not really find them, as the airport was nearly empty. After some re-modelling of vehicle/fuel depots and assigning trucks, I decided to start the automated flight planner again and see what happens. The automated flight planner immediately planned a full day and week of flights, so that was a good test to see if the same delay issue would happen again. With the trucks being closer to the stands, the turnaround time went down drastically which resulted in all green boxes in the flight planner. Also the ‘ghost’ planes disappeared and now only scheduled flights came in.
, kuddos who made it to this line 
