Airports

In Simutrans-Standard, aircraft of any type can land at an airport of any type and runway of any length. There is no concept of a control tower (although some paksets have graphics for them, which are coded as extension buildings).

In Simutrans-Extended, unless otherwise selected in the simuconf.tab file of the pakset, an airport must have a control tower for aircraft to land or take off there. Further, each aircraft has a defined minimum runway length in meters, and cannot land or take off from a runway which is too short. A substantial part of the code for the latter feature was written by Bernd Gabriel.

The aim of this feature is to improve the realism of air transport, to make land and sea transport more competitive against air transport for shorter routes (especially in terms of operating cost) and to make the implementation of air transport networks more interesting and challenging.