It seems the lift-type pushback is the preferred one in most instances
As explained many times on the forum, the pushback vehicle choice is related primarly to the airplane weight, with some extra constrains that prevent the larger vehicles on smaller parking spots.
I have spent hours trying to adjust afcads and sim.cfg's to get appropriate vehicles to spawn at small and heavy gates in P3D4.5.
You wasted lots of time you shouldn't have, because by playing with the parking radius sizes you are trying to leverage the parking size constrains, which is not related in any way to the "kind" of vehicle ( towbarless vs towbar ) but only to its size so, for example, if you lower the parking radius, you might get rid of the towbarless pushback truck but, in the meantime, you are also losing the larger vehicles with a towbar so no, it's not the correct approach, because you'll end up using a 737/CRJ smaller vehicle with a towbar on an heavy airplane, assuming that's you are using on an heavy gate.
A lot has been discussed about pushback vehicles in the forum and I, for one, am eagerly awaiting the release of the suggested 'choice of pushback vehicle' as part of the menu.
That's surely can be done but, before doing that, which will just put an extra (and potentially annoying) menu choice, wouldn't be best if you just said WHAT you don't like about the current automatic selection ?
What's the main reason of wanting to get rid of the towbarless vehicle (which in reality is becoming more and more popular ) ? You just don't like it, or you think GSX is using when it shouldn't ? If yes, please make some examples.
In the meanwhile, is there a way to prevent the spawning of the lift-type pushback?
As discussed in many other threads, the best choice is to act on the Pushback vehicles SIM.CFG file, which will save you having to edit the airports. The "condition" parameter in the [Couatl] section of the SIM.CFG is an expression that controls if that vehicle should be a candidate for being choosen on a given situation so, for example, this line:
condition = %(aircraftWeight)g >= 180000 and %(parkingRadius)g > 12Which is found in the SIM.CFG file of the two larger Pushback trucks ( FSDT_Pushback_02 and FSDT_Pushback_03, one with a towbard, the other without ), means ANY of these two can appear, if your plane emptyWeight ( from aircraft.cfg ) is at least 180.000 lbs AND the parking radius is larger than 12 meters.
Now, supposed you hate the towbarless kind, and would like to reserve it for super-heavy airplanes only ( 747, A380, etc. ), changing the 1800000 to 360000 in the FSDT_Pushback_03 (that's the towbarless), will restrict it only to planes with an empty weight of 360000 lbs and up.
There are other two towbarless (smaller) variants, which are the FSDT_Pushback and FSDT_Pushback_TPX, which have similar constrains you can also edit.
Sure, if you run the FSDT Live Update, you'll have to redo those edits, which is why I asked if you think those criteria should be changed, the why and the how because, if it's just a matter of using better selections criteria, it's far better to have the automatic selection working correctly, since nowhere in real world you, as the pilot, are supposed to "choose" which pushback truck you want and, instead, we are trying to simulate some kind of ground crew "wisdom", because that's their job.
