Open GSX - free at all FSDT airports - and choose an appropriate gate from the GSX menu.
Really?!?
Really, with the following two obvious advantages:
1) You can see terminals named as in real life, ESPECIALLY at JFK, where some names could NOT be replicated with the standard .BGL naming convention. Are you able to define a parking in the AFCAD as "Terminal 4, Gate 7" or even something more strange (real life KSFO) such as "Gate C 45A" ? You can't, so you'll have to use unrealistic names such as 407 and who knows what for the C 45A (it's A or B ?).
Not with GSX, which can associate a friendly name to every parking.
2) Instead of a very long and annoying list of ALL parkings grouped together (there are 215 of them in JFK), which would forced you to scroll through such long list, (with unrealistic names), to find the one you want, you can see the nice and tidy GSX menu, with parkings grouped by terminal, so the list will be easier to use, and with real names too.
So, the time you supposedly "lost", by having to position on the runway before starting the flight with the standard Go To Airport menu, will be surely gained back since choosing a parking with GSX is way faster than scrolling through hundreds of parkings of the default method.
But it gets better: what if you changed your mind or made a mistake ? Switching to a different gate with the GSX menu + Warp can be done INSTANTLY. Using the standard Go To Airport menu, instead, will trigger a scenery reload.
You say "All our sceneries always have the gates set as GA, and this is a common method used by many scenery developers..." Not by FlyTampa, UK2000, FlightBeam, LatinVFR, Taxi2Gate, Aerosoft... In short, you're the only scenery designer I've come across who makes all their spots GA.
They might not always used "GA", but they DO use non-gate naming for precisely the same reason: to get rid of the default ground vehicles which would conflict with additional ground detail placed, it's the same principle:
http://www.flytampa.org/support.htmlGates are mislabeled as Ramp-Military-Cargo.
In FSX we use the label Ramp-Military Cargo instead of Gate as a means to prevent the FSX engine from placing generic service vehicles at the Gates. These default vehicles are unaware of their surroundings and could potentially appear inside terminal walls, jetway structures etc.
