My short feedback.

 

Air Hauler has incredible detail and is a really fine program that allows you to do so many things in a realistic environment including management functions.

 

BUT

 

You are forced to play this thing in real time. As a starting pilot, you must fly everything yourself (later you can hire pilots). So, you must start and stop each mission completely in one go to get credit and build reputation. If you dont do this, you really get slammed and will never be successful and will loose money. Then you cannot hire extra pilots to do other missions, which is the only way to make this thing really work if you cant be in your plane flying around every day for long time periods.

 

Even when you are off line, the game clock is still ticking. If you don´t do enough, your reputation, again, will suffer, and the above negative things will occur.

 

SO, IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THE TIME TO FLY CLOSE TO EVERY DAY, DO NOT GET THIS OTHERWISE FINE PROGRAM UNLESS THEY CHANGE THESE FACTS.

 

And since the program has been around since 2009 and the developers will not answer my questions, I guess they won´t do this.

 

What a shame.

I'm only moving this to the FSX forum because it's not in response to an AVSIM review (as far as I can tell) and if you wish to make a personal review, it has to be more detailed for obvious reasons.

As far as I'm aware, Slopey and Co. answer all kinds of questions on the Just Flight forums- the devs are very active in the Air Hauler community and there is a community 'fly-in' scheduled for December 1st. In the manual it says you can use the time advance if you must (I have when faced with a six hour flight and not been penalized).

Accelerated time

There are no limits to using accelerated time in Air Hauler – it's entirely up to you.

(page 42, Air Hauler Manual)

 

My name is Dave. I'm an Air Hauler addict.

 

 

Hope that helps,

kind regards,

Dave

"Divorce in a download", that's what one reviewer called it. I looked into Air Hauler, but decided that I was not that dedicated to flight sims, so I still make up my own flight schedules. It certainly looked like a nice piece of software, just not my sort of thing.

"Divorce in a download"

 

HA!...tickled me that did

The main problem with Air Hauler is that you cant "pause" it and go on vacation without planning it first in airhauler. Its this critical function that drove me away from this otherwise fine product. Oh and I also wish you could have more control over the departure and destination airports.

The game is designed this way on purpose to force some realism and responsibility. That said, would be nice if there was an option to 'cheat' and pause time if real life demands it.

 

Slopey is the game developer and very active on his forums. If I remember reputation loss is the only penalty one takes on real life vacation and it won't go lower than a set point of 40 points I think. So with a bunch of short flights is doable to earn it back.

 

 

You can only gain reputation by self-flown flights, though there is a work-around involving using AI pilots to make a delivery but manually unloading the cargo yourself.

Reputation is lost by failed jobs (late, wrong airport, damaged/destroyed cargo)

Reputation is also lost by inactivity, but there's a floor, below which it will remain constant.

Reputation is lost by closing a base, unless there's another within a certain distance. That's interepreted as abanoning customers and there's a penalty for it.