Econ 2018 is Live

James,

You're right to say that you should not be carrying more than the specified number of passengers and weight of cargo, regardless of the capacity of the aircraft you have chosen to fly the mission. The idea is to choose the aircraft to fit the mission, not the other way around. The "fixed" cost piece <em><strong>is proportional to</strong></em> the MTOW of your aircraft and the number of hours duration of your flight. The number of hours is primarily a function of the distance between the origin and destination of the flight assignment, and secondarily of your choice of route. That's why we call it "fixed", even though it depends weakly on your choice of route. The MTOW is a function of how large an aircraft you chose to employ in fulfilling the assignment. Big aircraft can carry more, but they also cost more to operate. So, the trick is to use an aircraft which is large enough to carry the assigned passenger load and cargo weight, but doesn't have too much unused capacity. As you will appreciate, this is a piece of the modest "real world" aspect of the new model, and it's the reason that every seat seems to be filled on most flights these days. Hauling unoccupied seats is a great way to lose money. Of course, it's difficult to find any aircraft which is an exact fit to every assignment, so it's largely a question of what you have that comes close. Some of us have a big hangar full of aircraft and others don't. That's why this isn't intended to be a pilot vs. pilot competition. Besides, even if you had every possible aircraft, it's not likely that you would be equally proficient in flying them, and that's important for knowing their fuel consumption rate and handling them well, aspects which can also affect your profitability through their influence on possible penalties charged for carrying too much fuel or landing too hard. So, concentrate on doing the assignment well. It's the journey that matters.

Mike

No Problem Jim, you did everything correctly, it was a programming bug that interfered with the display of the data, but it was all there waiting to be displayed <img src="tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-smile.gif" alt="smile">.

Yes...the g-force is a common issue, especially for those of us using real world weather addons like ActiveSky. I've found that I have to turn the turbulence setting down quite a bit - especially in the smaller model aircraft otherwise I can pick up g-force penalties that probably wouldn't occur in real world. Short of disabling the g-force penalty altogether, it's otherwise downright impossible to account for all the various weather, sim, and flight model settings. So...I keep the g-force penalty set to what I believe at real-world settings and leave it to the individual pilots to adjust their various settings to handle the g-force when flying Econ.

Sorry about the confusion on the display and other things, but we appreciate the patience as we roll out this new and somewhat complex addition to SPA. It's pretty difficult to test out all the bugs until we actually start getting actual data inputs.

John