Whilst I understand your point, I fail to see why the size of the gate determines the route the bagage loader will take.
You couldn't just trust my explanation that IT DOES ?
It doesn't matter if the gate is sized small or large, point A (the parking position) will remain location at the same coordinates and so does point B (the loading position). GSX should simply calculate the shortest route.
You don't seem to understand: it's NOT a "simple" issue of calculating the shortest route! That would be TRIVAL in fact but, of course, it won't work. At all. I'll try to explain it, again:
What GSX needs to do, is to first place the vehicles. They are either placed on a default position, based on the parking size, or in a custom position you customized manually. However, this placement doesn't know *anything* about their destination, because vehicles are many times placed BEFORE you stop the airplane.
Yes, of course, if we waited for the airplane to be parked and THEN calculate the starting position of the vehicles based on the airplane (instead of the parking), we could easily create routes that always worked, but then you would both lose the ability to specify a parking soon or even before landing AND the vehicles would pop instantly in front of you AFTER you park, which highly unrealistic.
That's why we only have the parking to work with, and the airplane is a variable that we cannot fully control because it depends by a combination of:
- the airplane door position
- the airplane parking position the moment you stop the engine and put brakes on.
And no, it's not "the shortest route". We must calculate a Bezier Curve which would allow the vehicle to do a SMOOTH turn, with no hard corners, taking into account:
- The vehicle wheel base
- The vehicle stopping distance from the airplane, which depends on the airplane door's HEIGHT as well (the higher a stair is, the further back the vehicle must go)
- The fact the vehicle will have to end up with an heading which will be exactly perpendicular to the airplane door HEADING
Sometimes, it's just mathematically impossible to fit such curve, so the spline will turn around itself, and the vehicle will too.
Again, in order to be sure this is something we can or should fix, I would need a PROPER reproducible report, including ALL the data I listed many times, for example in the following lines of this post.
I understand the above, however as you can see in my initial post with the attached pictures, the loaders are quite a substantial distance from the aircraft, which should allow for a proper calculation without curves that are too tight.
It's not possible to say by just looking at the picture. I would have to check ALL the following:
- The airport used
- The gate used
- The eventual GSX customization made for that airport
- The airplane used
- The eventual GSX customization made for that airplane.
- The precise, exact coordinates of were you parked.
And, if this problem happens *everytime* (with the same gate/airport/airplane, parked in exactly the same position), or ONLY on arrival, after having used GSX on departure. THIS makes all the difference in the world because, if it's only happening on arrival, is a certain kind of problem but, if it's happening everytime, I'm 100% sure it can be fixed by customizing the starting position of the vehicle. Assuming, of course, the airplane configuration is correct.
