As many have said before, seeing the passengers should be a nice feature. I would like to go a little further... 

it would be interesting if the weight of each passenger ( randomly generated accordingly with company restrictions) was taken into account and boarding was done in real time. So the payload would be updated in real time, and the comparison between the calculated ZFW and the actual ZFW would be more realistic.

Same for the refueling and the luggages ...

Another remark : Didn't see anything in the Episod about Marshaller animation and Docking Guidance System ....

 

Yeah, or the video is lacking features or the game is. But there are things that we are interested about and we didn’t hear anything about yet. Deicing wasn’t mentioned either. 
 

I saw there were baggage’s for the A320 NEO. But the 747-8i should have ULD’s instead, and nothing was shown neither. 
Some special cargos for palletized aircrafts could be good too (small aircraft engines, vehicle parts, vehicles or other type of cargo that can fly inside the cargo bay...) 

Edited February 27, 20206 yr by aleex

I don't deny that it would be interesting (to some people) and realistic to have all that stuff, but I can't help thinking that the vast majority of people who end up buying the sim would find all that stuff boring to the point that if it was an option you could select in the sim, I bet you many people would turn it off because they didn't want to sit there in their virtual cockpit for an hour whilst the thing was loaded. They'd just want to kick the tires and light the fires. That's why I suspect it'd be better as an add on such as GSX, for those who were interested in such levels of realism, because I think it'd be a wasted effort for Asobo to go mental on the detail levels to that extent when most people wouldn't bother even using it.

Don't get me wrong, I know it is all very critical in the real world, it is after all, an important part of my job in real life to sort out all that stuff. But here's why I know that super-realism would bore a lot of flight sim users, by way of an example...

When we load something like a Cripple Seven or a Screamliner for Etihad Airlines, those things are usually flying a long way with a stopover en-route. Because of that, they tended to be sat on stand for a few hours prior to their departure, and so it is usually only about an hour or so before their scheduled push back time that we'd go out to them and start work on loading them up, although they would have been cleaned and serviced with catering in the hours before we got there, which is why seeing cleaning crew would only be realistic in a sim of that kind of operation if you loaded up your flight a few hours prior to actually flying the thing.

Where the actual cargo and passenger luggage load is concerned, you need to wait until you have a good idea of how many passengers and bags are going on the thing before you can do a load plan, and of course you need a load plan in order to be able to load the thing, which is why it usually only commences about an hour or so before the departure time. At about the same time, the fueling would also commence. Most of the time, the cargo pallets and cargo ULDs would have been prepared some hours before and been driven to the stand's inter stand clearway, ready for loading, but the ULDs with the bags would still be in the process of loading at that time since you cannot reasonably expect every  passenger to turn up at the airport and check their bags five hours before departure, so a passenger bag ULD might only make it to the clearway perhaps 15 minutes before the thing was due to push. And the same would be true for the late bags which would drop down the chute onto the head of stand. These bags would be going in the rear bulk hold along with stuff such as company mail, pillows and blankets etc, and some of these would only get on stand literally five minutes before the thing was due to go. This makes the pushback a bit hectic because you have to do a walkaround check of the aeroplane to ensure all the GSE (ground service equipment) is clear of the aeroplane, the chocks are out and all the hatches are closed and locked, and when the hatches only got closed two minutes before the thing was due to push out, that would mean you had to be pretty swift in checking all that stuff!

So anyway, to load up you'd get your load plan, read the PMC pallet (cargo) numbers and the AKE ULD can numbers on the plan, locate those items on the clearway, and then have an idea about what had to go where in the front and rear holds. This is because you have to not only load the cans in an order which balances the aeroplane correctly, but also load the cans which were going to come off at the intermediate route stop last, so they'd be able to unload them at that destination without having to unload all the other stuff just to get to them. Then you have to assess the risk of tail-tipping and probably start loading the front cargo hold first in order to prevent that from happening, so, heavy cargo pallets invariably go in the front hold, but not always, and since you would be waiting for some bag cans for a couple of different destinations (locals and transfers), sometimes you couldn't load the cargo until you had one of the other cans.

So you can see that to have a 'realistic' weight transfer occur in a realistic time frame for a big airliner, in real time, would be fairly tricky to accomplish in a simulation. Especially since it is not unknown for a bag to go in a can and get loaded, only to have the passenger not turn up and not board the aeroplane. Ever since 1988 when the Lockerbie bombing occurred, which was caused by an unaccompanied transfer bag going onto the plane (Pan Am Flight 103, Boeing 747-121, Clipper Maid of the Seas), if a bag gets checked and loaded and then the passenger does not board, the bag has to come off. This means you sometimes then have to offload a can (and sometimes more than one to get to the can in question), open it up and literally sort through all the bags in the can to find the unaccompanied bag and remove it.

That sort of thing is a right pain in the @rse, but it is vital for safety and security, so it is the reality of how passenger aeroplanes are loaded, in order to avoid an incident such as that horrendously tragic one in 1988 from ever occurring again. As a result, a lot of the time we'll be at the BRS computer at the head of the stand (baggage reconciliation system), carefully checking to ensure the bag count which is in the system actually tallies with the bags which were loaded onto the aeroplane, and only have that sorted and signed off moments before we zip everything up and get ready to go. Having that in the sim would be incredibly realistic, but it would bore the @rse off most flight simmers to have things be THAT realistic. It'd be far better to have a reasonably convincing representation of what genuinely goes on, but not to the extent of how it really happens much of the time.

Edited February 27, 20206 yr by Chock

Asobo should indeed concentrate on the core and leave such detailed loading procedures to 3PD addons.

Marshalling aircraft on the other hand, including small aircraft at FBO, would be a nice default addition.

The marshallers would certainly add life although I know they aren't everywhere,  they can certainly be limited to C and above class airports. Like they explained they already do with other elements of aiport life. 

Yup, marshaling would be good to see because it's a common occurrence, and not just on remote stands with no safedock system. Even on stands which have a safedock system sometimes that system breaks (the safedock screen where you select the aircraft type is an LCD one, and it gets wet sometimes or is damaged by strong sunlight, then the display becomes unreadable, unless you stand to the side and squint etc), meaning a marshaller will have to guide the thing on stand, and sometimes the safedock system can be functioning correctly but will not read an aircraft type correctly, for example if an airliner has a dark paint scheme and is coming on stand at night. This happened a lot with that black Air Canada paint scheme and that black Airbus A340 which sometimes comes into Manchester. It  is why you don't see many black airliners, even though admittedly, they do look cool.

2 hours ago, pierre63 said:

Didn't see anything in the Episod about Marshaller animation and Docking Guidance System

I hope marshallers and docking systems are featured as standard within the sim. It really should be. Has anyone seen these things in any of the videos? I may have missed them. It's hard to imagine they have not included those things when I have seen the people animations and baggage being loaded.

51 minutes ago, Chock said:

It'd be far better to have a reasonably convincing representation of what genuinely goes on, but not to the extent of how it really happens much of the time.

Eh, woah, I wasn’t meaning to take it too far haha. Just some different ULD/pallets, some variation, just like the different color of the baggage’s on the video 😅

It’s more a visual thing (like in Euro Truck Sim/ ATS with the different loads), than a flight dispatcher simulator. 

I agree that something that deep should be more a 3rd party thing, but a basic stuff would add some realism. 
 

 

Nope, but I'm sure if you go frame by frame, study each, drink lots of coffee you may see something.  

Like I did in the soundscape video. 

There are different color buses,  and airport equipment and stairs. Ie: for different airlines? I'm not sure, but they are there. 

One of the things GSX could do via customisation, was allow you to re-livery your GSE with real world logos which I suspect the new MS sim wont have owing to copyright clearance and licencing. Not that this will bother most people, but for those who are mortified to see a Menzies truck servicing a Lufthansa A321 instead of a DNata one I guess that's something lol.

But I'm sure they can be repainted 

Is it really a sim if there aren’t any plane spotters behind the fence at the end of the runway?

5 minutes ago, Anthracite said:

Is it really a sim if there aren’t any plane spotters behind the fence at the end of the runway?

😂

3 minutes ago, Anthracite said:

Is it really a sim if there aren’t any plane spotters behind the fence at the end of the runway?

A no buy if there aren't plane spotters with Nokia cameras sipping hot chocolate 

Since the Airport Video introduced ground staff (virtual humans) I believe this is a great beginning of a concept that can be eventually extended by 3DP or later update from Asobo to become any staff or human presence type.

Just like any AI type in ESP/FSX was extended and customzied by users/3DP...