Are you on Steam or Microsoft Store version?
Store
Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it?
No
Brief description of the issue:
None of the aircraft parked at the gates have their tail logo lights on at night so the planes are all dark. It would be nice to be able to see the plane logos at dusk, dark and dawn.
Don’t recall if this has always been an issue. I noticed it with Aerosoft Simple Traffic and they said this is an issue for Asobo and not related to their addon.
If they’re parked, then the electrics should be off, therefore no lighting. I don’t know of any carrier that leaves electric circuits on like that. But if they’re parked in the dark, then they should be well away from taxiing traffic, or be parked under sufficient lighting to be visible.
Most of the time, airliners parked at gates (and cargo aircraft parked at stands) are running their APU, or are connected to ground power. This allows the avionics and climate control / air circulation systems to operate, in addition to keeping the lights on in the interior.
In this condition, these aircraft are likely to have their nav lights and logo lights turned on.
Here’s an example of this at KLAX:
Yeah, but those aircraft are in the process of doing something. Either a cleaning crew cleaning the cabin, or the flight crew doing some things, or even in the process of boarding or disembarking. Whenever there is someone inside the aircraft and doing something, then the electricals would be on either from the APU or the Ground Power Unit being run. Which if the policy is to turn on the NAV/Logo on whenever someone is inside the aircraft, then the lighting would be turned on.
But when there’s nothing being done on the aircraft, and there’s no one on board, no activity, and it’s parked for the night and no more flights until the next morning. There’s really no reason to keep the electricals or APU running. That’s just a waste of electricity and fuel, and it’s expensive for the airliners to have to pay to the airport for the Power bill, and the fuel cost.
Back to OPs questions, Parked Ground Aircraft at airports in MSFS are considered as empty aircraft. There’s no one there, and nobody working on them. So they’re considered as fully parked and off. So there’s no electrical, and no lighting needed.
If you look at moving AI traffic, either a departing aircraft, you would see their NAV lights would be on, which will turn on the tail lights too. Same with arriving AI aircraft, you would see them taxiing with the tail lights on, and when they park they stay on, until a specific amount of time where either they disappear, or the lights turn off because the crew has left the aircraft.
Thanks BremyG! That’s what I would like to see! Instead I see dark airport gate areas (no overhead lights) and all the planes dark outside but with cabin windows lit up. This is very strange and I would like to see more like the picture posted by BremyG than what I’m seeing and having to creep through the dark taxi ways at KMSP to find my gate in the total darkness with a bunch of darkened parked aircraft around me.
I’m not stating that it is useful to have an aircraft powered on for no reason, but that most aircraft at a gate are likely being actively turned around, and are therefore likely to be powered and illuminated. In my experience, a cold/dark aircraft at a gate is relatively rare.
Yes…and every aircraft dark! and no lights at all on the gate parking area. If you want I can post a comparison picture to the one BremyG posted. The current KMSP gate area is all dark and the planes are all dark and it looks like it might be the film set for a Stephen King movie.
No need, we all know what you mean. And yes they’re all dark. With the reason I posted above. In terms of MSFS perspective, Ground aircraft are parked aircraft, nobody is doing anything inside, so they’re all dark.
Only AI traffic that has been activated which means it’s an AI traffic that’s in the middle of doing a pre-departure process that’s lit up.
The only way to have those aircraft lit up, is to actually have them spawned as moving offline AI traffic at the gate, but the number of AI traffic being spawned is directly proportional to the FPS performance load that your CPU will have to carry. The More offline AI traffic you spawn, the slower your FPS would be.
Another alternative of a fix is by actually light up all ground aircraft by default. But the downside is all ground aircraft will have all lit up like a Christmas tree, 24x7. Even the one parked in a remote corner somewhere would be light up.
I’m not trying to defend them or anything. I’m just good at analysing how things work and especially how MSFS treats ground aircraft and AI traffic and their lights. So I’m not sure why this is posted as a bug. Ground Aircraft never had any lights since launch. My suggestion is to post as a wishlist, and get people to vote on them. Who knows, maybe the devs could actually add a new feature into the sim engine that can either turn on/off based on the parking type and (maybe) time of the day.
True, but if you ever fly to Australian International Airport at domestic terminal at 10 PM, you’re already on the last flight and the entire terminal is practically empty and the shops are closed. Even in International terminal can appear dark and empty after midnight. Even though the airports are technically open 24x7. All the aircraft that are sitting at the gate are all cold and dark late at night.
So unless the sim engine is improved with a new feature to determine whether the ground aircraft are dynamically have their lights turn on/off depending on a specific parameter. There’s no way we’ll be able to get them just because the current engine is just not designed to do that.
I’d be fine with the optional setting to turn on parked aircraft lighting. Still, I’m not sure your real-world analogy holds up, because I think I was seeing planes with the cabin lights lit but not the exterior tail lit. I’ll have to check on that to be certain though.
That could still make sense though, since cabin lights are operated from the cabin and not the cockpit. So if there’s no flight crew doing anything in the cockpit, and you have like a cleaning crew doing some cleaning in the cabin, then the nav/tail lights would be off but the cabin lights are on.