Connection banks and the MCT window

How PlaneSim decides whether two flights connect (per-airport MCT up to a six-hour maximum), and how to build hub banks the connection score rewards.

Most passengers do not fly where you fly non-stop. They reach you as connections: they land on one of your flights and depart on another, with a walk through the terminal in between. Whether the sim sells them that trip comes down to a single window at the transfer airport, and everything about hub building follows from its two edges.

The window

Minimum connecting time, MCT, is the shortest layover a passenger can physically make at an airport. It is set per airport. Bigger, busier hubs take longer to cross, so their MCT is higher; the default is 45 minutes, and a world can raise it at its largest airports. The other edge is the maximum connect time, six hours by default.

A connection exists only when the layover is at least the MCT and at most the max. Below the MCT the passenger cannot make it, so the trip will not book, and it does not matter how attractive the fare is. Past the max the gap is no longer a connection, it is a stopover, and the sim stops counting it.

The classic mistake: a beautifully timed feeder lands 30 minutes before a long-haul departure and carries nobody onward. Thirty is less than forty-five. That is the entire analysis.

Checking your work

On the Scheduling page, once you pick an airport pair, the Connections panel lists every arrival-to-departure pairing in the booking window and colours each by how the layover sits. Too tight means below the MCT, shown for context but marked as won't book. Works means inside the window, a live and sellable connection. Too long means past the max, no longer counted. You can filter by direction, by connect quality, and by who operates the other flight: you, an alliance partner, a codeshare, an interline partner, or anyone. The header shows the airport's MCT and its max, so the window you are aiming at stays on screen.

Banks

A bank, or wave, is a cluster of your departures leaving close together. The art of a hub is to land a wave of feeders just before it, each arriving inside the MCT-to-max window, so that one bank of departures sells connections from every feeder at once. Land six feeders 60 to 90 minutes before four departures and you have created dozens of through-itineraries from a handful of flights. The multiplication is the point of the exercise.

There are exactly two ways to waste flying at a hub. A stranded arrival lands but nothing departs within its window; its passengers cannot connect here, so it only carried local demand. An unfed departure leaves with no arrival feeding it; it sells its own origin's traffic and nothing from the network. Both should trend to zero.

The bank designer

Open any airport you operate and the Your banks panel draws your day: a 30-minute histogram with arrivals in teal above departures in amber, each departure bank numbered on the timeline so the waves are visible at a glance. Below it sits one row per bank: its local window, how many departures and destinations it holds, how many arrivals feed it, the connections that result, the median connect time, and a score.

The score rewards craft, not mere legality. It sums connection quality over every fed connection: a layover timed right at the MCT scores about 1.0 and tapers toward zero as it approaches the max window. Tightly banked feed beats technically legal feed. The same connections, made crisper, score higher, which is the game telling you to compress your waves.

Rules of thumb

• Put feeders on the ground roughly MCT to twice MCT before a departure wave: early enough to make it, late enough to score well.
• One well-fed bank beats scattered departures. Concentrate, do not smear.
• Watch the max. A feeder more than six hours ahead of its onward flight feeds nobody.
• A tight domestic hub with a low MCT can bank far more aggressively than a sprawling international one. The window is the terrain, so pick hubs accordingly.

The full write-up, including the exact panel semantics, is the Hubs, banks and connecting time article on the wiki.