Welcome to the first episode after the grand opening.
It's a little late. We hoped the stress would decrease with the opening,
but it didn't quite work that way. All together, it's very positive.
It's in full operation for five weeks now, and there are many things happening.
Something breaks or there is some wear and tear.
The self-closing slits are shaking a little again but we're working on it.
The past five weeks had its ups and downs for me.
It's a dream come true to see how great everything is running.
It's also a dream to see that all the worries we had
were either unfounded or we prevented them early enough.
We didn't have a single breakdown.
But what's different than expected -
the proud programmer believes that he has everything under control - but no.
Various people controlled the layout, ten hours a day.
They discover things, that I couldn't even imagine during development.
They also press buttons in an order, that I couldn't have imagined.
We had bizarre things, such as airplanes flying backwards all of a sudden.
Of course, that's something one has to reprogram.
There are also things I haven't shown before the opening.
I have talked about the touch-and-go landing but never showed it.
We programmed various touch-and-go landings.
An airplane can do that randomly,
or - it's very loud now, there's a touch-and-go landing in progress right now.
This Thai A380 did a touch-and-go, because our only A380 position is occupied.
My alternative in the past was to circle once inside the shadow airport,
if the plane can't leave because there is no room for it.
Now the plane performs a touch-and-go landing if it can't find an unoccupied position.
This will occur more often in the coming months.
We have 36 parking positions, we can do about 20 take-offs on a good day.
That's important for me: How many take-offs can we do per hour?
Because I also have to calculate the rotation of planes.
If I wish to occupy about 30 parking positions, and do 20 take-offs per hour,
then an airplane at the terminal has a standing time of 1,5 hours.
But in real life, the planes stand only 45 minutes.
We are looking for a compromise: We want to use as many planes as possible
and show different airplanes, and we'll find the best solution.
Different planes have different parameters for touch-and-go landings.
I've talked with pilots and came up with various scenarios
that look more spectacular to make it really exciting,
and to create an aha moment when a touch-and-go landing suddenly begins.
It's a bit tedious to do only optimizations for weeks.
We all love to create something new.
But we have little time for that now.
But we have something new since yesterday evening:
We often had the request
to let the tires screech when a plane touches down.
Actually, that's quite unrealistic because you can't hear the screeching usually .
The airplane is just too loud or too far away.
But judging by the reactions of our visitors, they really like it.
It seems to support the impression that the film industry conveys.
So I'm watching every single plane land
to hear if the screeching is in the right pitch, if it was calculated correctly.
Screech! There it was.
So much for this episode of Gerrit's Diary.
I don't want to show you pictures of me
searching for software errors in the night.
That's why I'd rather show you our finished airport.
Thank you for watching and I'm already looking forward to the next episodes.
