Air Hauler

[nillefix 0]

Anybody using AirHauler? Any good?

[Chock 17,769]

In my opinion it's quite simply the best add-on for FS in years. Buy it, you won't be sorry, although you might bemoan the lack of sleep it will cause (but an interesting aspect is that your AI pilots you hire will fly whilst you are sleeping, so you can queue up jobs for them and keep your company making cash whilst you are busy with real life). In short, it adds a whole new dimension to Flight Simulator and turns it into something vastly more enjoyable and immersive. I'm fairly certain that it's going to pick up every award for FS add-ons that it is possible for a product to get.To elaborate: It gives you much more reason to fly your aircraft in the correct fashion and weigh up the costs involved. You have to consider fuel prices and the world stock market too (Air Hauler is index-linked to the real world incidentally). It's also important to weigh up pilot wages, pilot skills, when to hire and fire pilots, where to open bases and when to do so, whether to lease or buy aircraft, whether to invest in stocks and shares, when to repair aircraft and when to defer minor faults. Routing, aircraft types and weather all play import roles in your flights too, the list goes on.If you are the competitive type, you can upload your company stats to an Air Hauler stats page and see how you stack up against other companies people are running, for example, I'm currently the person who has made the longest flight in AH, and my reputation is climbing, but I still have to work on the condition of goods I deliver, which is at about 98 percent at the moment. You can check out every aspect of all the other companies, such as what aircraft they fly, where they are based, how many personnel they have etc.In terms of making flying more fun, it takes you to airports you might never have considered visiting, with all the flight planning challenges that offers, you have to sometimes divert when things go wrong too, which then adds more fun in terms of business challenges. As if all that wasn't enough, it has what I can honestly describe as the best developer support I have ever seen for any add-on. You can contact the devs easily and they fix any glitches in a matter of hours with patches, and if you have difficulty importing aircraft into Air Hauler for use (which to be fair is rare), the developer will get back to you personally with a solution (I've had that happen just the other day with the CS C-130 and had a CFG tweak solution emailed to me in hours, with a promise that a patch will shortly provide a permanent fix).If you like repainting aircraft and making scenery, it adds a whole other dimension to FS as well. I've been going nuts making scenery for bases, aircraft mods and liveries just for Air Hauler. It's a blast. My latest base opened in the UK:Absolutely love it, and I bet you will too.Incidentally, you can download the PDF manual for it and check it out for yourself, to see if it blows your skirt up in terms of features, which I've no doubt it will.Al

[Guest Sinnerman49]

I had been waiting for Air Hauler since it's announcement in development. I can definitely say I am not dissapointed. It's VERY immersive, and very professionally done. - it's definitely on another level then products like FSCargo and Cargo Pilot. I'm still very low on the totem pole, doing career mode where you start with a C172 and have to work your way up. I just recently bought a used 182RG and am excited to expand from there.Get it. you wont be sorry.`LS

[Carob 2]

Is it very difficult to set up to use your own aircraft?

[Chock 17,769]

Generally speaking it's very simple, just click on a few things in Air Hauler to import your add-on aircraft and it then appears on the list of aircraft you can buy or lease.All the default FS9 and FSX aircraft are hard coded into it and most add-on aircraft go in no problems, but very occasionally you get one where the config file has not been done correctly by the developer and when Air Hauler reads that incorrect config file it can get the stats of the aircraft wrong as far as fuel capacity, range and cargo capacity go. But, it's never a big problem really, as the chances are good that someone has already had the aircraft in AH and has posted the corrections you can make to the config file to get the thing working on the AH page on the Just Flight forums (worth a look there if you want to know more about Air Hauler). If not, it's usually simply a case of going to somewhere like airliners.net, finding out the correct weight, range and fuel and then typing those into the aircraft config file to correct matters, once that's done you simply reimport the aircraft and all is well.The only ones I've had to tweak so far have been a freeware C-123 Provider, the Flight 1 ATR-72 and the Captain Sim C-130, and the tweaks took a few seconds to do. Al

[Macflyer 2]

Sounds all really great and I'll be checking this one out. I remember I got very excited when Cargo Pilot was released. The only problem, I was on the "wrong" sim platform back then.When I got into FS9 I tried the demo. I liked it, but I thought it got quickly very repetitive. No motivation for running it as a "business" type of games. Got hooked on FSCargo for for other reasons.But Air Hauler seems like a game to get into for long time.

[Macflyer 2]

Sounds all really great and I'll be checking this one out. I remember I got very excited when Cargo Pilot was released. The only problem, I was on the "wrong" sim platform back then.When I got into FS9 I tried the demo. I liked it, but I thought it got quickly very repetitive. No motivation for running it as a "business" type of games. Got hooked on FSCargo for for other reasons.But Air Hauler seems like a game to get into for long time.