Ideas for more realism: Slots.
- A slot is a combination of a certain time of the week (e.g. Monday 7:00 to 11:00 or Sunday 21:00 to 6:00) and stand.
- Slots have a fixed length that depends on the aircraft class; with special handling for overnight slots.
- You can create slots on a stand through drag and drop in the flight planner.
There are two slot types:
- “Assigned” slots are filled by assigning an airline contract to it.
- “Open” slots are filled automatically with charter flights (similar to GA), or they may stay unused if no suitable flight is generated.
Charter flights:
- A dozen or so Charter flights are randomly generated per day. (No charter flights are available in the Heavy class.)
- Every charter flight is for a certain time window in the current day (e.g. 6:00 to 12:00). They are sorted by the time window and starting with the earliest, automatically assigned to the earliest “open” slot that fits completely into the charter flight’s time window.
- The unassigned charters are shown in a “missed charters” list, so the CEO can decide whether or not to provide more “open” slots.
Contracts:
- Contracts are for a certain time window(s) in the week (e.g. Monday 6:00 to 12:00, or Monday and Thursday 6:00 to 12:00, or Monday 6:00 to 12:00 and Wednesday 15:00 to 19:00). A stand slot has to be inside this window for the player to be able to assign the contract window to the stand slot. (a Monday 7:00 to 11:00 slot would allow a 6:00 to 12:00 contract assignment).
- On-time contract flights bring in extra money, delayed contract flights cost extra money.
- There are contract fulfilment counters: The number of on-time departures (departing from the runway before the end of the contract time window) minus five times the number of late departures for each contract. A contract is cancelled and its assigned slot "open"ed) when its fulfilment counter falls below zero.
- There is a “global” fulfilment counter, aggregated over all contracts and the accepted “open” flights. The number of available contracts is directly depending on this number. As long as the number is negative, no contracts are generated (you can still regain access to contracts by fulfilling your “open” slots - also, this is how you gain your first contract).
- Example: If you have managed to get out 15 flights in time and only 1 delayed, your global fulfilment counter is 10 and you gain your first contract, which you get to keep until the contract’s fulfilment counter falls below zero. If you lose that contract, but your global fulfilment counter is still 10 or higher, a new contract is generated.
Pros:
- If you have a well-running airport, smooth as an oiled machine, you have no more micromanagement with contracts, you’re only stacking them up.
- You have to grow your airport over time, because you don’t have the same number of contracts from day 1.
- You have, in theory, indefinitely many contracts at your disposal, provided you can serve them with a quality airport.
- If you take in contracts beyond your airport’s (or computer’s) capacity and your quality suffers, the system is self-regulating, because lost contracts are not replaced indefinitely.