I just thought I'd post here a quick 'how do I know?' regarding picking a flight, knowing beforehand which aircraft is scheduled for the route.
When you go to the 'Book Flight' page you will be offered available flights to you depending on the following criteria :-
1. You are type rated on the aircraft that is scheduled to fly the route.
2. There is an available aircraft of that type to fly the route from the airport.
3. The flight is not already booked by someone else.
When a route is 'scheduled' and entered onto the system a specific aircraft type has to be allocated to operate that flight. Unfortunately at the moment the system will not differentiate between different models within a 'type'. So when you see a BA11 on a route, they are ALL 500 models, but this will change shortly, so in the near future, it could be a 200, 400 or 500.. When you see VC9 it could be Vanguard or Merchantman, DC-3 could be a passenger or freighter version, Visc could be 700 or 800srs, VC10 could be Standard or Super.. In order to distinguish between version I have given different flight numbers to each.
http://cbfsim.co.uk/cbfs_bb/viewtopic.php?t=5868
I will be subdividing the 1-11 flights soon, as at the moment they are all operated by 500 srs - I will put the 200/400 srs onto the shorter routes. I will let you know when this happens.
Whilst on the subject of the 1-11's, I have a lot of flights just about ready to go onto the system. These are the usual 'holiday flights' with UK departures from EGBB, EGCC, EGGW and EGKK. I am still desperate for information on 1-11 UK domestic flights and european shorthaul. I will post a seperate thread for 'routes required'.
For those of you that know your registrations, you can also recognise the type from these. If you don't know them then you can check by looking at the 'info' button alongside each aircraft listed on the 'Fleet' page. I am sure you will soon get used to a quick scan of the fleet page to know where the aircraft are
You'll probably be realising now why the fleet is so large - to give you more choice. We still have some major spending ahead of us to get the fleet to a level where availability is not a problem. The aircraft utilisation is already on the increase with a few aircraft already having had their first maintenance checks. I'm still trying to get an overall picture of things and how they are working out. It may well be that we will need VC10's transferred overseas to allow for maintenance, time will tell.
A lot has happened in a very short time and there is a lot more work still to be done to get the rest of the routes and aircraft in place. It's a steep learning curve for everyone but we're getting there. Rome wasn't built in a day
Rgds
John - Still somewhere in the Lake District