How long prior to its departure time should an ai plane appear at its gate? I've often noticed that when I first load fs, I'll have a bunch of ai traffic at the gates. Some will pushback immediately, some soon after, but some will sit at the gate for quite a while. Is this normal?Sidney Schwartz [KPDX]

Hello Sid,When you position your aircraft to an airport for the first time, the gates will be filled with aircraft with a priority based on your Flightplans.txt file sequence. The program reads the flights from top to bottom and places the required aircraft accordingly, until either the flights end or the gates fill up. What is important here is to understand that the priority is not based on departure time (i.e. soonest to depart gets the first gate and so on) but on the relative position of the flight plans in the file.Such flight plans may include flights departing several hours after your current time. These aircraft will stay at the gate till their planned departure time.Also, the aircraft that have a departure time up to 15 minutes prior to your current time will also be loaded. Naturally, these aircraft will push back and depart first and almost immediately, as they are already up to 15 minutes behind scheduled departure.Stamatis

Hi Stamatis,Thanks...very helpful information!Sidney Schwartz [KPDX]

Some of it also has to do with the flight plan files themselves and how they were put together. Some are much worse than others.Matt