I wish Osobo would include at least one parking spot at every airport. This includes the small “bush” airfields in remote places and the water airfields in SU5.
Currently, there are thousands of small airfields, airports and heliports without a parking spot.
No “services” such as ground handling or fuel need be available for these parking spots, just keep it simple! 
Without this feature, you have to select a runway and start with the aircraft powered up ready for takeoff.
I like many enthusiasts, want to start cold and dark at an airfield/airport/heliport. 
As an example, below is a small remote Australian “outback” community airfield - YMEI Mereenie Airport. It has no parking in the sim, but clearly, it has an “apron” for parking at the real airfield (highlighted with a green line).
I think it’s difficult for the Blackshark AI to assign parking spots if the satellite imagery doesn’t have any clue or sign that suggest that it’s a parking spot.
The photo that you provided, there’s no marking, no object to suggest that area is a parking spot. It looks the same as the surrounding desert. So it’s difficult for the AI to determine it as a parking spot.
I guess one way to fix this is when AI can’t determine the parking spot is by having the parking spot to have one spot to be “randomly” assigned. Even so, everyone needs to be okay if this is the way to go, the parking spot can be placed on weird location due to the randomness.
I think the important issue here is that the sim decides for you to start with engine(s) running if you spawn on a runway.
Spawn location and initial plane configuration should be selected separately, IMHO.
5 Likes
Thanks for your valuable input, all you say is true. 
I understand the reasoning for engines running when you choose to start on a runway is probably to add a sense of real-life to the experience. I’m a recreational pilot 
and know that you never leave your aircraft on a runway for any reason 
. But this is a simulator/game so the rules we follow in real life don’t apply.
I’m happy to keep the sense of real-life to the experience and wish for the parking spots to start cold and dark as you’d expect to in real life!
Cheers.
Parking spots are hard to assign without cues and the same might also apply to the links that need to be present to create a taxi path. If the airport has been enhanced or created as an addon then it should have parking. Adding parking and taxi paths to a favorite base airport that has none is relatively easy. There is a learning curve to the SDK and tools that can do this but a lot of folks have started out adding some parking and taxi paths
Hey Jon,
You’ve been around for as long as I can remember and I know you know your stuff when it comes to FS/P3D , so I really appreciate your experience and knowledge with regard to this topic.
I also appreciate the complexity to overcome with the parking spot placement methodology. One solution suggested was to just give us an option to “spawn” cold and dark anywhere you want to. Just like the good-ol-days.
Anyway, I reckon Osobo can do something like this if they put their mind to it! Otherwise, it’s going to be a compromise by going back to the P3D and FSX starting method. 
Or leave it to 3rd Party Products (but no one will pay for this), or will they? 
2 Likes
Thanks for remembering me 
There are developers who produce freeware which can be in the same class as some payware.
2 Likes
So answering the original post, yes it CAN be done but involves manually adjusting every airport - all 36,500-odd of them… Hmmm, Asobo have resources but I can’t see them devoting that much to it for now. For the moment therefore we seem to be in the good hands of the third party devs.
1 Like
Unless they can come up with an automated way of doing it then yes we are in the hands of third party developers. Bear in mind that a number of small strips only have grass parking and there is not likely to ever be a tool that can find them and add them to the airports
It’s also the case that this situation has existed since the early days of flight sim. Even today a lot of airports in say P3D are likely not to have any parking. If you take my local airport EGCW this is what it looks like in FSX
No parking
This is what it looks like in the base MSFS
It has parking by default. Assuming that 30000 airports need some parking added and assume that each takes half an hour then that’s 15,000 hours of work
Over the years users of FSX and P3D enhanced their own local airports and shared the results so over time there are addons available for many of the airports
Each time there is an update to MSFS there are more airports that are updated. Not many in the grand scheme of things though
I would hope that over time this will also happen for MSFS.
1 Like
I like this idea. I hate using airports where I have to start ‘ready to go’ on the runway.
It would seem possible to add a single default ‘parking spot’ just off the runway midpoint if there is no other data available.
This might not work everywhere (park you in the sea or forest for example), but I’d bet that it would work for 95% of the simple strips (noting of course, that 76.2% of all statistics are made up, as we all know 
)
1 Like
Honestly, I just wish it were easier to add parking. I’ve tried a few times to add parking to a grass airport I grew up near, and I’ve yet to figure out how to do it properly. I submitted a request several months ago on the .to with the hopes of someone else doing it, but no one has. There’s one if two things I’d like to see:
- The process of adding parking spots ourselves to be easier, with clear instructions on how to do so.
Or
- Make the world map a satellite image, with the ability to manually choose any spot on the map to spawn cold and dark on the ground, similar to how you can choose any spot to start airborne.
Which could likely be scripted, with some rules in place. The same “AI” that was used to generated the airfields in the first place could be tasked with this.
I really hope this can be done at some point as I do a lot of flying from small strips and if this can’t be done then at least having an option to start cold and dark from the runway would be nice.
I kind of noticed this too at some airports & was like “Why is taxiing to parking/gate disabled?”
Thought it was a bug at first. It is kinda annoying though.If your plan was to end the flight at that specific airport. Maybe that could be an alternative.Ending the flight after 45 second of successful landing.
You don’t actually need to taxi to a parking spot to end your flight. If you have landed at one without any parking spots, just taxi off the runway, announce you are clear then find a safe spot to shut down. Just don’t taxi back on to the runway, or even attempt to cross it again or the sim will think you want to take off again.
1 Like
oh didn’t know that,I’ll try that next time I land on such an airport. If thats the case, maybe a notification will do " clear the runway & find suitable spot to safely shut down the plane" .
You have to contact “ATC” to say you are clear. Well, I say have to, it just confirms the state of your flight is no “Turn off engine” rather than taxi, taxioff etc.
This is one of the big reasons I wan to see an Airport (and potentially scenery) Gateway system implemented.
The idea would be that end users could modify airports for their own installation but submit those changes to the developers for approval in a future update.
I was on an airport where I couldnt get past the “announce the runway is clear” I shut down the plane then but not sure if flight completed.I did get a new achievement on landing though…Maybe this is a bug.I’ll better put it in the mega bug topic of this patch too
I agree that the “AI” method to determine if a parking place is present is probably limited. However, I don’t know if it’s impossible! 
that can solve the problems we think are impossible!
