Again forgive my ignorance on this subject of military aircraft, my question. Is there really that many fighters and trainers at some of these airfields?
I go on to view some of them and there seems too many, I have done the odd flight plan and had to change to another airfield because of the congestion.

It would help to answer your question if you gave some names of the bases you are looking at.

I'm not on my main PC right now but one off the top of my head was RAF Valley it has lots of small fighters and some trainers, there are a few more very similar.
My question was is this normal on RAF airfields, it wasn't meant as a complaint just a general question?

Valley is a very busy RAF Airfield, it has many variants coming in and out most of the working week not just from the uk but from other countries too! it also has scheduled flights to and from cardiff in the Metroliner through Citywing! in my sim Valley is by far the busiest RAF Base! i have had to edit a fair amount of the flight plans to stop a build up of waiting planes at the runway as there were sometimes about 10 waiting to take off and about 5 incoming!

Much thanks

Mark

One limitation of the AI traffic system is that you can only make flight plans for one week at a time. You are creating a snapshot of traffic movements for a given base that represents only one time period out of a whole year.

The funny thing about all airplanes is that they spend the majority of their time, not in the air but on the ground. It's up to us how we represent those times between in the air and on the ground. I personally like to see all the different models and paint jobs when I load up a particular base. That means I don't want the flight plans to have the aircraft gone the majority of the week, I want to see them at their base. That's probably not a realistic set of flight plans. But that's how I like my sim to be.

So yes a given base in the sim probably has too many aircraft on the ground at a given time but some of that is on purpose and some of that is just the limitation of the AI system.

Most flight plans have a variable percentage applied to each aircraft. Try moving the traffic setting slider to the left to see if that cuts down the number of aircraft visible. If it doesn't, you can edit the flight plan and apply a percentage yourself.

John