How do you manage United and Delta AI post merger

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

Just wondering how you guys who use WOAI or other .bgl based AI merged your Delta and United AI after the two companies merged with Northwest and Continental?

 

Currently I am using WOAI packages for all four of those airlines and was thinking of decompiling all four then moving the Northwest flight plans into the Delta ones and reassinging the NW paints to equalivant Delta paints, then doing the same with United/Continental.

 

The only thing is I want to avoid overload of Delta and United a/c originating from the departure/arrival airports.

 

Then of course there is the need to download a bunch of United repaints for all the aircraft. Unfortunately WOAI doesnt seem to have an updated version of both airlines that includes the United repaints.

 

Wondering if anyone has suggestions or can point me to the most current flight plans of these two airlines and then I can assign the appropriate a/c and paints to those plans.

 

I've been putting this off for forever and finally want to tackle this and get up to date. Then I only need to worry about all the AFCAD parking reassingments that wil be another chore.

 

Thanks

[scott967 62]

Use updated plans from AIG. Current releases are United based on the week of 23-29 Jan 12 and Delta based on week of 12-18 Sep 11.

 

scott s.

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[Christopher Low 5,324]

I am quite happy to keep Continental, United, Delta, and Northwest all separate.

[catchman 13]

The other thing I would do is assign whatever you want to sim as the texture (pre merger or post merger) and go into that ai's aircraft.cfg file, look for atc_parking=XXXXX and add the three letter code for whatever airline it merged into.

 

For example, when NW and DL merged a few years ago, I wanted to sim operations with both carriers using their own logos. So I went into each aircraft.cfg file for both airlines and added NWA to the parking for Delta planes and DAL for the Northwest planes. For the regionals, they are usually coded with as XXX(airline)X(x representing regional) aka DALX and NWAX. So I did the same addition to those planes. This kept me from having to completely reorganize every afcad airport file save for those I chose to fix.

 

Hope that helps. It's tedious but rewarding.

[duckbilled 310]

I know you mentioned BGL based AI but I have to mention this was easy with UT2. Before they had the new schedules, all you had to do was go in to the UT2 NWA section and assign repaints to the appropriate planes. For example, if 30 NWA dc-9's were repainted in Delta colors, assign 30 delta dc-9's to NWA's flight plans. Once 50 are painted, up the number to 50. The change would take about 3 minutes once the repaint was installed in to FSX.

 

I'm only pointing this out because UT2 gets bashed here on a regular basis but ones of its big advantages is its interface and its ability to assign paints to flight plans.

[catchman 13]

Like every AI program, UT2 has good and bad points, but it's management features are downright ingenious. Highly recommend it especially if you like to tinker with your traffic.

[bobbyjoh 11]

Just as a side note, I use MyTrafficX and it has done all that merging for you. The update was easy and did not take a long time. My own view, I like spending time flying instead of days of merging files IMHO. Like someone said there are pro's and con's to any software but over all I find MTX to be the perfect AI program for me and its correct on AI types worldwide.

 

Bob

[Boeing or not going 578]

Speaking of mergers. A small bug with UT2, they still had US Airways using their old callsign, the correct callsign after the merger is CACTUS, taken from America West.

[flyerkg 62]

My initial response to the mergers is to swap aircraft names into the old airline and ensure the new parking codes are included in the aircraft files. I recognize that in real world some of the mergers are not that simple. Sometimes servicing airports (hubs, destinations, etc) change as well. Developers like AIG are doing a great job of keeping things updated.

 

My other solution right now is that I still use FS9 from time to time. I have revised all of my AI commercial traffic to Retro liveries from 1980's and my 1980's military AI traffic is coming along as well.