Waiting Passengers

[EHM-2383 Ian]

Can someone explain how the numbers of waiting passengers for ProPilot flights are arrived at? I notice that lots of the flights that I would like to fly have very few waiting passengers and wonder if, realistically, given these small numbers it is worth flying these flights. Would it not be the case that, in the real world, these flights would be cancelled for reasons of economy?

Ian

[EHM-1465 Dominic]

Good question Ian

The waiting passengers feature is not worked out in a very scientific way, it was just added to give some 'background realism' to your flights, a bit of airport ambience if you like.

That said, there are routes throughout the world where there are few passengers but the route is sustained by government subsidies (to maintain connections to small and inaccessible places) or by combined passenger and freight ops to boost the income.

So perhaps your chosen airports have lots of air freight waiting too

[EHM-2097 Andrei]

I can only partially answer to this one.

How the passengers appear on some airports wishing to fly here and there... only they know !

On the other side, whenever a pilot performs a PP flight, it is assummed he flies the aircraft with as many passengers as possible, and this number is deduced from the "waiting passengers".

This explains why on certain routes, very popular among pilots, there are no waiting passengers: all have been already served.

Now, doing a flight with a full plane has indeed a small incentive (passengers sum up in a "whole carieer" counter in the pilot stats). However, it is not the intention at EHM to discourage flights performed with a low load.

This would lead to connections like "I cannot do this flight because someone else did it before me, grabbing most waiting passengers" - which is not how the PP system is supposed to work now.

Personally I am looking at the waiting passenger numbers when I decide where to fly to but always use this as a low priority criterium.

One last comment, currently there is no connection in PP between flights and their return counterparts. A pilot doing a flight has no obligation to do the return flight as well. As a consequence, you can find a lot of passengers at airport A willing to go to B and none on airport B willing to go to A.

In this situation, I think we should not ignore the unfortunate virtual people on A and ruin their virtual businesses, holidays etc. only because there is no virtual money to make on the virtual return flight

Andrei

[EHM-2383 Ian]

Thanks for replies folks. It would be good - but perhaps the programing would be too complex (??) - if there was some system in place to allow passengers to make a return journey. This would also, possibly, prevent aircraft from being left at certain airports for months on end meaning they are not availble elsewhere, especially at hubs.