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Post by alaskanflyboy on Apr 17, 2020 13:00:45 GMT -5
This idea came to me while creating a preferred parking list for Midcon's gates. Some of our destinations (e.g. Phoenix) use international terminals. It would be a nice feature if FSCaptain assigns a designated international gate when arriving from another country. I know you support customs procedures already, so I imagine it would be a simple matter of the customs required flag triggering the parking algorithm to assign an international gate instead. It would conversely ignore international flagged gates for domestic flights when the customs flag isn't in play.
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Post by Travis on Apr 17, 2020 20:46:58 GMT -5
This is an excellent idea!
I'll be back in several hours with my first thoughts.
Feel free to contribute until then....
Best,
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Post by Travis on Apr 17, 2020 21:19:51 GMT -5
My first few thoughts.... If an airport with Customs indications had 'defined international parking', then we could partition an airline's parking depending on the departure airport's country. Without a Customs indications code... I'd guess all parking spots are open for everyone.... So I can see a method where a configuration file ("international_parking.txt" ?? ??) could use the preferred_parking.txt file format to indicate which parking spots are dedicated for international flights. And a simple check of parking resources with an IATA/ICAO code of "INTL", would allow us to flag a BGL-derived parking code as being 'international' or not. (AFAIK, there is no current airline with an acknowledged code of "INTL". A short-lived Canadian airline in the early 1990s owned the code "INT".) Any other ideas / suggestions are welcome! (I'll be mostly offline for a week or so, dealing mostly with family in a fun capacity.)
Best, |
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Post by alaskanflyboy on Apr 18, 2020 11:58:58 GMT -5
I was thinking it could be a tag in a preferred parking config. Using Phoenix as an example:
KPHX,A,1,MCA,JETWAY
KPHX,A,3,MCA,JETWAY
KPHX,A,5,MCA,JETWAY
KPHX,A,7,MCA,JETWAY
KPHX,A,9,MCA,JETWAY
KPHX,B,21,MCA,JETWAY,INTL
KPHX,B,23,MCA,JETWAY,INTL
There should never be an airline with the code of INTL as ICAO specifies 3-letter codes and IATA specifies 2-letter codes. As for what users set for codes, that's on them, but even our virtual airline still uses the 3-letter code MCA. The chances of a user setting INTL as a parking code in their aircraft.cfg would be infinitesimally small.
In looking further I also noticed we have a set of gates at KLAX that are that are specific to our 737 and others specific to our 777/787s. Perhaps capture the four letter aircraft codes a well?
KLAX,,42A,MCA,JETWAY,B772,B788,B789
KLAX,,42B,MCA,JETWAY,B772,B788,B789
KLAX,,46A,MCA,JETWAY,B772,B788,B789
KLAX,,46B,MCA,JETWAY,B772,B788,B789
KLAX,,51A,MCA,JETWAY,B738
KLAX,,51B,MCA,JETWAY,B738
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