City Tour timeline & logistics

What the model assumes

• The clock and the fuel are solved separately, then collided. Fuel decides how many tours fit between uplifts; the clock decides how many of those blocks fit in the day. Lengthen the tour and the fuel block shrinks first — that is why five becomes four becomes three on its own.
• The route is the real one. KAFD → DR-15 → DR-14 → BLVD 1 → MRBA → BLVD 2 → BLVD 3 → Tour Ext 1 → DR-15 → KAFD, 12.9 NM, plotted from the surveyed coordinates. Three orange points are the sightseeing stops the aircraft orbits: BLVD 1, Murabba, BLVD 3.
• Airborne time is split transit / orbit. Up to 3 minutes of the sold block is held over the three POIs, the rest is flown proportional to leg distance — which is why the aircraft pauses on the map rather than sliding round at constant speed.
• Fuel per tour = (start + shutdown) × ground burn + airborne × airborne burn. At the baseline that is 35 kg, of which 5 kg is burned sitting on the pad.
• The airport stop carries a clearance wait. OERK is a controlled field, so after refuelling there is typically 5–10 minutes of start-up, clearance and taxi before departure — engine running, burning ground idle, and the uplift has to cover it. Defaulted to 10 minutes. KAFD X is a private ground pad next door with no sequencing, so it carries none.
• The airport routing is real; its timing is operational, not calculated. The OERK fuel run follows the published UVR structure KAFD → T → Y → Z → J → OERK — 26.7 NM by route against 12.8 NM direct, which is what makes it a 20-minute leg rather than the 7 minutes the direct distance implies. No leg time anywhere in this model is derived from distance — every one is a slider carrying an operational figure.
• 320 kg is a weight-and-balance cap, not the tank. The H125 holds 427 kg usable, so roughly 107 kg of capacity is deliberately left unused — the hatched band above the cap line on the gauge. Every fuel stop uplifts to a little above 320 so that after the leg home the aircraft is on deck at exactly 320 for the next tour. That headroom mostly buys back fuel stops rather than tours — at 427 kg the baseline block goes 6 → 9 and the day needs only one stop instead of two, but it still flies 18 tours because the clock, not the fuel, is the binding constraint. It pays in tours only when the tour is long enough to be fuel-limited: on a 22-minute tour it is worth two extra tours (11 → 13).
• The fuel limit is a break-off trigger read on the deck at 1.06 — never leave KAFD below this — not a figure for arrival. It is what the crew actually decides on: enough for another tour, or go now? The arrival figure falls out of it. KAFD X floors at 95 kg, putting the aircraft on the pad next door with ~83 kg; OERK floors at 130 kg, because that leg spends ~50 kg more and lands on the GA ramp with ~75-80 kg. Both floors are hard — the slider will not go under them.
• Positioning from base is outside the window. The day starts with the aircraft already on deck at 1.06 and fuelled. The SRSC legs at each end are a further 20 min and 50 kg each.
• Basemap. Satellite and Street pull live tiles (Esri World Imagery / CARTO), so they need internet — the route stays registered to the imagery through every pan and zoom. Schematic always works offline. In a sandboxed viewer that blocks external requests the two tile options disable themselves; open the file locally for imagery.
• Not modelled: weather holds, pad conflicts with other UAM traffic, crew changeover, and the engine-cycle cost of that many starts — which may be the real ceiling, not the clock.