Hi all,
Just to give a brief overview of how the arrival traffic works in FS Traffic.
One of the more common support tickets we receive is regarding Ai aircraft frequently going around on approach, either due to traffic on the runway, or more commonly, due to traffic not having the correct separation on approach.
The limitation we face is that the MSFS Ai Traffic / ATC system does not apply any form of separation to the arriving traffic. ATC just directs them to start the approach immediately and does not take into account other traffic in the area.
This then leads directly to another issue we face with the default MSFS traffic system which is when an Ai aircraft performs a go-around, there is a sizeable chance that the aircraft will not receive further instructions from ATC to rejoin the approach. If the Ai aircraft does not receive instructions from ATC it will not know where to fly to, so the aircraft will fly back to the last waypoint on its flight plan (which in our case is the destination airport) and will fly over the airport at a very low altitude.
As MSFS doesn't handle this separation, we have to add separation via code and the only way we have found to do this is by controlling the timing and position of the arrival traffic generation.
So the way the arrival traffic currently works is we take all the arrivals in the 1 hour period the player is currently in, and then space those arrivals out equally over that 1 hour period. For example, if you load into an airport at 1020, we process all of the scheduled arrivals between 1000 and 1059 and then generate them in equal time periods for the duration of that hour (so if there are 6 arrivals scheduled in that hour, an arrival aircraft will generate every 10 minutes). With v1.0.5 we also added a hard limit to this arrival traffic of a maximum frequency of 1 arrival every 3 minutes. From our extensive testing, this provides the best balance of arrival separation and quantity.
As we have to apply a fairly significant amount of code to make sure the arrival traffic is generating correctly and with the best seperation, it is not currently possible to add custom flights to the arrival schedules.
We hope that helps clarify the logic behind the arrival system.
To clarify for future reference, the above is all correct using MSFS SU12 and FS Traffic v1.0.5, but this can and likely will change with future sim updates and updates to FS Traffic.
Mark - Just Flight