I’m at iad (Washington) although it happens in all airports.
I have a bunch of gates of all sizes. I have bought/unlocked arrivals from a bunch of different airports. Planes are arriving. The problem is that I currently have 8 or 9 airplanes at the gates, about 5 taxiing to the gates and over 37 in the air waiting to land.
How can I increase the landing rate? Why bother building more than 8 gates of buying more than 8 of each type of worker if that is the most that will ever be used at a time?
you can’t actually make them land faster, that algorithm is set by the game. the way to reduce the landing queue and thus get a few more in the airport is to not clear them for landing immediately as they appear, let them run down to say 30 seconds left, then select. On IAD where there are no departures to be worried about, there can be a steady flow, also use the cool down timer to limit the flow of new arrivals.
more gates becomes useful when you have a number of your own fleet. Your own fleet can also be good for blocking the arrival slots in order to reduce the queue, if you block all 4, you can clear the queue completely, and then use the timer balancing above to keep the queue relatively small. Also don’t open ALL the gates at IAD. The timer also works for generics on a function of the number of gates available vs arrival slots. Lots of gates means lots of planes arriving. IAD has 80 plus gates and only 20 servicing items (fuel is 25), so you don’t need to fill it. your airport will run nicely with 35 or so, because of the timing of when they need particular things.
also if you can mix up the L’s and the X’s a little in the arrival queue. They take the longest to get off the runway, and thus slow’s the landing cycle a lot, so if you have 3 M’s and an X in the arrival slots, do 2 of the M’s before the X. as the M’s will get off the runway faster.
Just some thoughts, i am sure others may have them too.