Airhauler vs FSPassengers

[VeryBumpy 272]

Finished most missions and am getting a bit bored with FSX.

 

From reading, seems these 2 programs are high quality and add a bunch of depth to FSX.

 

I'd be curious to hear any feed back on these 2 products.

Pros/cons?

Which is more fun, engrossing or satisfying to play?

[gandy 18]

With Airhauler, you will need a flow of cash ( ai pilots can help with this ) as you have bills to pay and you only get to fly cargo around, I have 1 ai pilot which does all the night flying for me when im sleeping :)

 

In Airhauler you just cant jump in a heavy and start flying unless you pick easy mode and sell the aircraft you get and take out a loan and hire a heavy, I had enough to hire a 757. With my Airhauler company i have rented a 757-200F which is costing me just under 3 million a month so having an ai pilot to help me is a must.

 

As airhauler runs in real time with bills etc.. you do need to pay attention to it and make sure you can pay your bills but if you keep the starting aircraft until you can buy a new one then all you have is the bill for the your base which 1 or 2 flights a month could normally pay for it so there is less pressure to fly to pay bills. What you earn for a job is based on your rep and the higher your rep the more you earn but you can lose rep as well.

 

The downside i have found to airhauler is its flight planner as it only creates a direct gps flight plan for ATC but i always create my own when im in the sim as i prefer to fly using correct routes.

[kac155 0]

One site: fseconomy.com

Although mostly for GA/bush flying, the community and interactions are great.

Check out the forum to get an idea.

 

[beoxx 6]

I've been using both programms for several years now. You could also take a look at FSeconomy. It's online based and free (but limited to GA and smaller Jets). I still can't say which one is my favorite or which one I would take If for some reason I only could choose one.

 

FSpassengers:

The penalty point system for pilots and the random failure system alone are worth it in my opinion. If you stall an airplane, or overshoot the runway, fly over 250 Knots under 10 k feet without permission, forget the taxi light or use reverse thrust under 60 Knots and so on you will get penalty points.

The random failure system gives you a nice thrill and adds bird strikes, failing landing gear, fuel leaks, electrical failures, and so on to your flightsim life. There is also the very "famous" tire blow. It can happen as a random failure or because you land to hard. Some people claim that this tire blow comes way to easy. You cannot turn it off and for some guys this ruins Fspassengers.

It also adds passengers, a stewardess and a copilot who talk to you and give you comments.

You can also buy planes, have to pay the fuel, do repairs and maintenance and set the prices for your tickets.

So the game adds to the realism. In comparison the economical aspects are very easy (and a bit boring because of that) in my opinion. Also it does not generate flights. You always have to choose for yourself where you want to fly.

 

Airhauler:

Airhauler really gives you the feeling of running an airline. Buy or lease aircraft, get bases, hire pilots, do maintenance. But if you play it as intended like a business man would do, you end up doing a ton of flight and mission planing for your ai pilots every day. In my opinion after the starting phase money is really not a problem here. Once you can lease your first A 320 or something you can lease the next after around 15 flights from that A 320. When you have 2 the next in 7,5 flights and so. You make a few hundred k $ with each flight. You come quickly to a point where you ask yourself...do I really need a 50th 747...what do I do with all the billions. And the tons of flight planing gets simply annoying in my opinion.

To avoid that I limit myself to only 3 active planes at any given time. At the moment for example only GA-planes and a small business jet. I also use a lot of workarounds to tweak airhauler so it does regenerate WAY less money per flight (but that is another story).

All of the games are not an economical challenge. But I would say that Airhauler is the best and most fun in that category.

 

Fseconomy

You can rent or later buy aircraft and FBO. The system or player driven FBO's generate missions that you can fly to make money. It adds a nice maintenance feature to the experience. Stuff on your plane can randomly break. You have to do 100 h checks and if you for example run your piston engine always on the limit and /or use a wrong mixture expect extra repairs. You have to exchange the engine after the TBO-cycle and maintenance is getting more expensive the more your plane ages.

It is a nice little community but as I mentioned you will find mostly short flights and I think the biggest planes are a crj 700, embraer 145, DC 6 and a hercules c-130 ( but a ton of turbine and GA's).

 

 

Conclusion:

I use them all. Fspassengers only for the random failures and penalty points. I always use it together with FSeconomy (which has the better ecomical systems). FSeconomy is fly, fly, fly.

Airhauler is a lot of managing you airline and pilots and some flying, too :). But it is good at that. So, after a long FSeconomy + FSpassengers phase I usually start another Airhauler-Scenario and play that for a while.

[NikkiA 7]

Also consider:

 

FS Captain,

 

it offers features very similar to FSpassengers, but is still actively developed. It doesn't have the economy aspect of FSpassengers however, as that is kind of unrealistic (for the pilot to be concerned with) for all but the very smallest of charter airlines anyway. Without the airline economy, there's no need to buy individual planes, so you can fly any plane when you want.

 

Ideal Flight

 

Similar in many ways to FS Captain (at least in the free version of IF), With the added advantage of Air Hauler style 'start where you stopped last' parking monitoring. Again, no real economy, so you can fly what you want when you want. Registering for the full version unlocks missions which seem quite interesting. It's HTML report generation is also particularly nice.

 

 

Quite honestly, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, you'll probably end up with 2 or 3 of them for when you want to engage FSX in slightly different ways.

[TheBFG 1]

FSEconomy is truly awesome, as is the community around it.

 

One thing I'd like is an FSEconomy style operation for bigger aircraft. I know there are all these virtual airlines all over the place but frankly I find the whole signing up process to be as laborious as real world job hunting. You arrive at a site and get pummelled with rules and regulations that seem a bit over the top really. I've never actually progressed to joining one because I stopped having fun far before I got to the end of the rule book and the restrictions/regulations.

 

We need a friendly, FSEconomy-type environment for flying airliners.

[ltnicolas 5]

Another thing to consider is Cargo Pilot, but I don't want to stray off-topic.

Never heard of FSEconomy, will take a look

 

I also use a lot of workarounds to tweak airhauler so it does regenerate WAY less money per flight (but that is another story).

OMG... you have to tell me how did you do that, I quitted Air Hauler because it was getting too easy

[beoxx 6]

Yes Airhauler is really way to easy. The only way to work around this I found is over some manipulation of the fsx aircraft cfg. files.

 

Airhauler gives you roughly $ 10 per pound you deliver. Which gives you easily several hundred k with a bigger plane per flight. Since I usually fly in the orbx pnw area on 200 - 600 NM trips this is way too much money with no challenge at all.

With the aircraft cfg files and the mtow and empty weight you can control how much the plane can carry (and how much money it generates).

 

1. First I usually make the planes more expensive by adding some weight to the mtow and empty weight (they are way to cheap in airhauler)

2. I change (again over the empty weight and mtow) the freight it can carry. Airhauler uses the formula MTOW minus empty weight minus fuel = usable payload.

This is a balancing act with many factors to consider.

3. Import the plane to airhauler. Airhauler will work with the numbers it got when you imported the plane. Change the aircraft.cfg back to the original numbers for fsx.

 

I also use a dummy plane to have some realistic maintenance cost. For example for a hercules c 130 I call it "c 130 maintenance cost /100hours". When it is time for the regular 100 hour check I just buy and sell that "plane" to get the according cost.

 

I set a realistic revenue per flight hour for the particular plane and then do the math backwards to determine the approx. payload it should have.

 

In the regular airhauler a c130 with 32000 payload on a 500 NM trip fully loaded gives you around $320.000. I run mine in the changed version with only 4000 payload = $ 40.000 revenue and my cost per hour is also a lot higher ($ 8.500 /flight hour). If you consider empty legs and stuff I make around $ 18.000 revenue per flight hour with the c 130. That is close to the real thing I guess.

My turbine Duke makes around $ 2.000 revenue and my Phenom 100 around $ 3.500 per hour. Together with the more realistic maintenance cost and price tags on the planes the considerations for the managing part of the game are a bit more like the real thing in my opinion.

 

A lot of flights are not economical that way and one has really to work out the routes and contracts carefully to make profit.

 

I had a lot of fun with airhauler again that way.

[VeryBumpy 272]

Wow, thanks for all the feed back.

 

FS Economy, FS Captain and AirHauler seem to be rather stolid or wooden. Lots of charts, numbers and managing with little player rewards or gameplay feedback.

 

I'm looking for more 'game' and less seriousness. Is FSPassengers my best bet then?

 

Or perhaps MS Flight offers the fun I'm looking for?

[NikkiA 7]

Wow, thanks for all the feed back.

 

FS Economy, FS Captain and AirHauler seem to be rather stolid or wooden. Lots of charts, numbers and managing with little player rewards or gameplay feedback.

 

I'm looking for more 'game' and less seriousness. Is FSPassengers my best bet then?

 

Or perhaps MS Flight offers the fun I'm looking for?

 

I'd probably suggest "Ideal Flight" then, especially the registered version with it's missions. They sound - I assume, since I only use the unregistered version - very reminiscent of Flight's style of missions.

 

http://www.codelegend.com/idealflight/

 

Try the unregistered version, it should give you a feel for the basic idea, without the missions.

 

 

I don't think investing in Flight is going to be much of an option, yes, there are missions there in Hawaii, but you'll soon work through them and be stuck with the dynamic missions, which are much less interesting. The Alaska DLC has no missions, surprisingly - and given that Flight has been canned, it's unlikely to get any in any update.

 

Another option may be to wait and see how REX's online career thingy works, although I'll wager it'll be pay-to-play, and given that most FSX users tend to veer more towards the 'realism and procedures' aspect, likely too "simulation" for you.

[molleh 451]

Unfortunately VeryBumpy, there is no more "game" style of, er, gameplay to FSX then what you get with missions. Any other addon utility is more of a dry, by the numbers "sandbox" style program. They are awesome (I like Ideal Flight personally) if you enjoy the flying itself more then anything, but you won't find anything that gives you story, voice overs, stuff like that.

 

It sounds like MS Flight would be RIGHT up your alley, but be warned, MS has already cancelled further development so buy add ons for it at your own risk.

[FloG 148]

If you want missions, there's http://www.flightsimulatorxmissions.com/, there are loats of freeware missions, some of them are really great fun to fly, and there also are some commercial mission packs, such as Aerosoft's Flight Tales, African Adventures, Twotter/Beaver Missions or Just Flight's Rescue Pilot.

Other than that, you'll always be confronted with some dry, maybe even boring stuff.

 

Regards

Flo

[VeryBumpy 272]

Did my first demo FSPassenger flight last night. Left San Fran KOAK and landed nearby at S75 in the water with my Aerosoft Catalina setup as a passenger plane with tiny crew and large cargo.

 

I REALLY enjoy the added sound effects with the pax chatter, crew announcements, in plane music and canned COM2 ATC chatter. I couldn't serve drinks cause I didn't go high enough, lol. Anyway, all the sounds and crew stuff happening make the flight much more fulfilling.

 

I freaked out the pax once causing too high a G force load when I was trying to figure out how to move the darn engine mixture levers behind me. Got a huge negative score cause I didn't use flaps properly.....uhh...this plane doesn't have any, score person.

 

Seems FSPax does not do a flight plan for you, I had to pause, AltTab out and research how to get to my destination airport.

 

FSPax seems like what I need, lots of spice into the actual flight.

 

I'd like to try the Air Hauler demo also but am unsure if it can be installed at the same time as FSPassengers?

[xplanery 250]

Yes they both can be installed same time.

[VeryBumpy 272]

Cargo Pilot, lol