Any ways to prevent this irritating "gate overlapping?"

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Hey there IFC.
I’m not sure if this should be a features request or not so I’m going to write this here as I just wanted to hear everyone’s opinions.

I’m sure many of us have experienced this and became extremely infuriated but have you ever experienced this before?

Picture this:
You’ve just landed after finishing a short or long haul flight. You’re taxiing to the gate and now all you have to do is park your aircraft at the gate while following the stand guidance (if there is one at the airport). Suddenly, an “Unknown” tag appears in front of you and all of a sudden, there’s an aircraft right inside you or either in front of you (depending on when they spawned).
What would you do in this situation?

・An ANA 787 swallowed by a Qantas A380 at LAX. (In a rather rare case, both players spawned at the gate around the same time.)

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・Me (The IF 757) about to park at Sendai Airport in Japan when this random Turkish registered B737-800 decided to spawn just as I was pulling in.

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・Turning into a vacant gate and suddenly it’s occupied.

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For those being completely overlapped (Example 1), pondering on what to do, the one taxiing to the gate would most certainly sit there and wait for the latter to disconnect.

For those being partly overlapped (Example 2), we would either push back and find another gate to park at or we would rev or engine very loud and aggressively to pressure the one at the gate to disconnect.

For (Example 3), we would do something similar to (Example 2). However, in this scenario, we did not collide with each other.

(I’m also trying to not blame the person that spawned at the gate because I’m sure they were also not aware that someone is currently parking there.)

My solution proposal
If the ATC is present, some of us would request a specific gate e.g. (Request taxi to Gate: ??? at the Terminal ?) while some of us would just request taxi to parking (any).
If one were to request taxi to a specific gate, and the ATC gives instructions to taxi to that gate, that gate should display the: “This parking spot at this airport is already occupied. Please select another parking spot” message on the home screen. Currently, this message only appears if one tries to spawn at a gate that is already occupied by someone else. (Known if there is a gray airplane icon at that gate.)

It won’t be very useful for those wanting to go to any parking spot as the ATC would mostly command: “taxi to parking, at your discretion” but it would be helpful for those that requests a certain gate and it would be something like: “This gate is already reserved by someone” to prevent others from spawning there for a short period of time.
What do you guys think?
& Thanks for reading!

7 Likes
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I agree this, this is weird issue…

I think it would be good to have a feature, where after landing or at airport, there would be a command, even in ATC Unicom, saying, “Taxing to Gate #”

And then, the system of IF, will make the gate to be reserved for you to park, and whoever are trying to spawn from Home Screen, will be unable to do, till the person the gate is reserved for, despawns or cancels the gate… or the gate hold timeout is over…

I think it would be good option, but I know, it’s a challenging thing to create for developers :sweat_smile:

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This issue is prevalent at busy smaller airports (like TNCM).

Hopefully, like @Swiss27 said, the devs could implement a ‘gate reservation’ feature in the future to avoid all of this

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I don’t usually fly into busy airports for this reason. So i definitely think something like this is needed to guarantee the gate you have selected to park at is yours.

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Whilst I think ATC is a good idea it doesn’t resolve the issue of people spawning in at the gate however… my solution is you “Reserve the gate” through the system sort of like booking it so all you would do is enter in the game put in you do your flight plan and when you tap on a gate you can reserve a slot time for it in UTC real time which would in turn lock the gate preventing anyone from spawning in and will hold the reservation for 1hr. This can be done at anytime during flight but you can only reserve 1 gate at a time during the current session and when you leave or are late it unlocks the gate. However ATC can still direct aircraft to that gate to park and unload ect… but 30 minutes prior to the arriving aircraft that gate is shut and no aircraft can spawn nor arrive at the gate. Multiple users can book the same gate as long as the times don’t overlap. This system would be only used in the Expert server. So a little more elaboration on @Swiss27 idea just done in a way of how I would do it. In a nutshell think of it being a table reservation just for a plane gate

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@Adam_R Look it’s you!

As for the thread itself, this issue has been a constant since as long as I remember. There’s no perfect solution. I forsee “gate reservations” to be a very limiting feature as arriving aircraft can reserve their desired gate, but then the same gate might be needed for departing aircraft.

1 Like