Thoughts on landing system

Hi guys! First off, thank you for a amazing game that already have stolen many of my hours.

I work with aviation control and have some thoughts and experience I would like to share:

Landing: As I can understand wind conditional landing should work (?), nevertheless I only get the planes to land in the same direction so far. But when it’ll work, it will be great. But only determining landing direction by weather is actually simplified. Normally a mix of considerations will apply in a airport with ATC:

  • Type of aircraft
  • Length of runway
  • Carrier type
  • Pattern

Landing direction can be any, as long as it is safe! A GA flight is very vulnerable against wind, and want to utilize the wind for its flare, but a medium or large commercial plane much rather want to go in for a straight approach, skipping pattern and save time, which for commercial flights is everything. This is safe as long as the runway is longer then the aircraft required landing distance (determined by aircraft type and current conditions) and as large planes are not affected much by wind a ILS landing can go all directions. The last considerations is the business of the local pattern and ATC priority, which may differ. Local physical conditions may also apply if you want to avoid a city, water etc. For easy ingame implementations, a random factor could be applied to medium and large commercial flights. The ATR72 we get, always do a straight in approach on our 3km runway.

A few things I also have noticed:

Weather: METAR and TAF support would be awesome!

Callsign: Add (invent) the actual spoken callsign for each airline. Like the identifier for British Airways is BAW, but its callsign is “Speedbird”. So a BAW123 would on the radio be called “Speedbird-1-2-3”. Also would just be a nice touch ingame, so you know what to call your planes :smiley:

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