Hi Fellow Pilots,

I was wondering if anyone can sum up in a nutshell why docking systems such as safedock only work in some of the addon sceneries that I have?  Most, if not all of my addons have some kind of docking guidance, but are they all specifically one type, like safedock, or are there different ones floating around out there?  I guess I'm just trying to figure out if there are any fixes that I can apply in order to get things working properly.  I know that UK2000 Gatwick has issues that can't be resolved without major programming, but is this why it doesn't work at other airports also?

Thanks,

John

If it's any consolation, sometimes those Safedocks don't work at real airports either! You might be interested to know that airliners with black or very dark liveries can confuse the Safedock system when taxying onto stand at night too, which is one of the reasons why black liveries, whilst looking pretty cool, aren't especially popular with airlines.

In such case, we still use traditional marshallers with illuminated batons, like these things pictured below (note that these are red ones, which we use for marshalling tow ons onto the correct stopping point and for stopping traffic when doing pushbacks, the Airfield Ops people use Amber coloured ones when they marshal stuff):

At Manchester we have a computer system in our crew room for our flight planning which displays information across the top of the screen (a bit like the rolling text on the bottom of the screen on a news channel), it displays info on what runways are in use, which taxiways, FEPS and Safedocks are unserviceable on that day and so on, and if there are stands with an unserviceable Safedock, then an Airfield Ops Marshaller will turn up on the stand and manually marshall the aeroplane onto the Stand instead of us having to key in the aircraft type to the Safedock system.

Back in the flight sim world, what is not normally there on a lot of airport sceneries, is the specific markers with the names of the individual aircraft types which show where the nosewheel is supposed to come to a halt to allow a jet bridge to easily move to connect to the door on the aeroplane without having to adjust its forward and backwards position too much other than simply moving out a bit to connect to the door, i.e. most airport sceneries do not have the aircraft type markers you can see on the yellow lines on this pic below (where incidentally, this A321 has stopped about a foot short of being dead-on to the A321 marker, which is still fine incidentally, it doesn't have to be super accurate and it's better to be short rather than long as far as stopping is concerned).

Now you might not be able to have a Marshaller guide you onto the stand in your sim, but you can still drive your aeroplane up to the front wheel stop marker by looking on an external view at it, in lieu of not having a marshaller to tell you when to come to a halt, and this isn't really any different from having someone observe that for you and wave a couple of light stick batons at you to help you steer and then cross them when they want you to hit the brakes.