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Gregg_Seipp

What do you guys think of Air Hauler 2?

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Seems interesting to me.  I'd like to have missions, though, I'd rather fly humanitarian flights or small passenger flights and such than for profit...almost all GA.  I'd like to have to do some weight and balance and have air hauler load up the airplane for me.  Can't say I'm really interested in building my own airline so much as be an independent contractor.  Does Air Hauler 2 fit that model in any way?


Gregg Seipp

"A good landing is when you can walk away from the airplane.  A great landing is when you can reuse it."
i7-8700 32GB Ram, GTX-1070 8 Gig RAM

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Hi, I use air hauler in Nomad mode. This mode does not require you to have a base and run a cargo line. I also have another company that fly's for missionary air fellowship www.maf.org as pretend company. The amount of humanitarian missions are limited. You cannot create your own. If you can, try to get on the early access forum at just flight to read all the posts. AH2 gives a reason to fly . It is also still being enhanced. 

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1 minute ago, Brian Weinrich said:

Hi, I use air hauler in Nomad mode. This mode does not require you to have a base and run a cargo line. I also have another company that fly's for missionary air fellowship www.maf.org as pretend company. The amount of humanitarian missions are limited. You cannot create your own. If you can, try to get on the early access forum at just flight to read all the posts. AH2 gives a reason to fly . It is also still being enhanced. 

That sounds pretty good.  It'd be nice to be able to create your own missions and/or share missions other people make in different categories.  Does it adjust to the kind of aircraft you have in your fleet?  E.g. I don't have the C208 in my fleet.  Does it load the fuel and cargo/passengers into your plane?


Gregg Seipp

"A good landing is when you can walk away from the airplane.  A great landing is when you can reuse it."
i7-8700 32GB Ram, GTX-1070 8 Gig RAM

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1 hour ago, Gregg_Seipp said:

Seems interesting to me.  I'd like to have missions, though, I'd rather fly humanitarian flights or small passenger flights and such than for profit...almost all GA.  I'd like to have to do some weight and balance and have air hauler load up the airplane for me.  Can't say I'm really interested in building my own airline so much as be an independent contractor.  Does Air Hauler 2 fit that model in any way?

Yup, it has humanitarian missions, and they are related to real events too, i.e. fly some medical supplies to hurricane victims, that kind of thing, which makes it interesting and occasionally risky too, since you might be going through rough weather to get there. As far as weight and balance goes, what happens is if you start it with P3D for example, it has all the default aeroplanes in there already such as the Constellation, Electra, etc, but you can import any aeroplanes you have installed and choose to configure them for freight or passenger layout, then you have to fill out a few parameters such as fuel burn rate, range etc. From that, Air Hauler determines the payload it can carry overall as an MTOW and as a physical capacity too, so, it knows how much fuel you can load up and how much cargo you can load up (in lbs), so, you can for example, take a cargo of X amount of weight, but there may be only so much fuel you can carry before you'll be over MTOW. You can overload the thing if you like though, as you could a real aeroplane, or you could do things more safely and fly part of the route, land and then refuel and do the next bit, that kind of thing. It really is quite realistic in that respect. As far as being an independent contractor, you can do that too, picking up missions to fly this or that cargo here or there, or doing air taxi flights etc. 

It does a lot more than all that too, for example you can trade stocks on the stock market, build production facilities, trade produce, etc, et, and that's really what makes it so good; you can dip in and utilise it for whatever floats your boat and skip stuff which doesn't interest you. So if you just wanna be a pilot flying air taxi in a Cessna and have it generate such contracts so you get to fly to unusual places, then it will do that, or if you want to build a massive empire with hundreds of facilities and a ton of employees and all kinds of business activities, and a massive fleet of 747s or whatever, then you can do that too.

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Alan Bradbury

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33 minutes ago, Chock said:

Yup, it has humanitarian missions, and they are related to real events too, i.e. fly some medical supplies to hurricane victims, that kind of thing, which makes it interesting and occasionally risky too, since you might be going through rough weather to get there. As far as weight and balance goes, what happens is if you start it with P3D for example, it has all the default aeroplanes in there already such as the Constellation, Electra, etc, but you can import any aeroplanes you have installed and choose to configure them for freight or passenger layout, then you have to fill out a few parameters such as fuel burn rate, range etc. From that, Air Hauler determines the payload it can carry overall as an MTOW and as a physical capacity too, so, it knows how much fuel you can load up and how much cargo you can load up (in lbs), so, you can for example, take a cargo of X amount of weight, but there may be only so much fuel you can carry before you'll be over MTOW. You can overload the thing if you like though, as you could a real aeroplane, or you could do things more safely and fly part of the route, land and then refuel and do the next bit, that kind of thing. It really is quite realistic in that respect. As far as being an independent contractor, you can do that too, picking up missions to fly this or that cargo here or there, or doing air taxi flights etc. 

It does a lot more than all that too, for example you can trade stocks on the stock market, build production facilities, trade produce, etc, et, and that's really what makes it so good; you can dip in and utilise it for whatever floats your boat and skip stuff which doesn't interest you. So if you just wanna be a pilot flying air taxi in a Cessna and have it generate such contracts so you get to fly to unusual places, then it will do that, or if you want to build a massive empire with hundreds of facilities and a ton of employees and all kinds of business activities, and a massive fleet of 747s or whatever, then you can do that too.

That sounds good.  I like the idea of being able to select cargo and fuel up front...load up P3D and let Air Hauler do the magic.  I assume you can have different profiles...e.g. an "independent contractor" profile, a "corporate" profile.  I mostly fly GA but, every so often, I get that "I want to fly a great big airplane" itch.  Does it do a decent job of distributing cargo in the big planes?  (e.g. PMDG and the like?)


Gregg Seipp

"A good landing is when you can walk away from the airplane.  A great landing is when you can reuse it."
i7-8700 32GB Ram, GTX-1070 8 Gig RAM

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I have airhauler 2 and am put off by its complexity and the lack of a decent manual

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2 hours ago, jkeye said:

I have airhauler 2 and am put off by its complexity and the lack of a decent manual

Do the youtube tutorials not help with it?  Seems like there are a lot of them.


Gregg Seipp

"A good landing is when you can walk away from the airplane.  A great landing is when you can reuse it."
i7-8700 32GB Ram, GTX-1070 8 Gig RAM

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2 hours ago, jkeye said:

I have airhauler 2 and am put off by its complexity and the lack of a decent manual

Well, as it says in the present manual:

'As the early access period continues, more information on features and detail will be added to this document, with a fully detailed manual made available at release.'

There is no point in the developer wasting time constantly recreating new manual PDFs every time a bug is squashed or a feature is tweaked or added. As it stands, AH2 Early Access is usable and completely stable, and sure, some features take a bit of figuring out, but it's not rocket science to suss out how it all works, especially since there is a specific support forum for the product. More importantly, I have literally never had either the original Air Hauler or the present Air Hauler 2 early access version crash, not once, ever, and that's amazing considering I've been using AH since 2009 when the first version came out and have used it with FS9, FSX and P3D.

13 hours ago, Gregg_Seipp said:

I assume you can have different profiles...e.g. an "independent contractor" profile, a "corporate" profile.  I mostly fly GA but, every so often, I get that "I want to fly a great big airplane" itch.  Does it do a decent job of distributing cargo in the big planes?  (e.g. PMDG and the like?)

You can have as many companies as you like, you pick which one you want when you fire it up (takes about 2 seconds to do that). Or if you like, you can have your single company with all kinds of different aeroplanes in its fleet, and your pilot can have personal, i.e. non company aeroplanes too.

I have some AI pilots flying passenger schedules in Citation CJ4s and some flying cargo jobs in ATL-98s, but I've also got some pilots who will be taking a type rating and building hours in another ATL-98 which I purchased in poor condition, which I will repair and then eventually have making cargo runs across the Atlantic with those newer pilots, one other ATL-98 (G-CARV) is the one I use personally for cargo flights. Note on this screenshot that one CJ4 is slightly damaged, this is because one of the pilots that operates that aeroplane is a bit lacking in skills, they will improve with time though and the aeroplane is insured. One of the ATL-98s is also damaged, it was like that when I bought it, which is why it only cost about three million Dollars to buy. It is being delivered to one of my bases by the seller, and that will take a couple of days as it is coming from the Western USA (I could have chosen to fly it myself if I wanted it quicker, but couldn't be bothered, so I chose the option to pay for delivery):

K62SnmR.png

 

You don't need a youtube tutorial for it, it's pretty much common sense, the UI makes it easy to understand and use.

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Alan Bradbury

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13 hours ago, Gregg_Seipp said:

Does it do a decent job of distributing cargo in the big planes?  (e.g. PMDG and the like?)

Cargo and fuel loading. Note that you can override this in the sim with any specific loading app such as those which come with PMDG etc if you wish to):

6ySsDl9.png

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Alan Bradbury

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Two other features: You can create your own home page with graphics to customize your opening page experience. The other is for when you lease or purchase another aircraft for your company, you can see that aircraft parked at times at your base when assigned to your hired ai pilot. I use aircraft I have purchased for prepar3d such as the Milviz beaver or Lionheart Kodiak. It's nice to see they can get some use visually for me.  There are so many possibilities in small GA company. One I use in July is taking customers to small airports located near the 21 stages of the Tour De France. It gets me out into the Alps. The missionary company has it's base in Papua New Guinea and someone made some STOL strips which are challenging. Immersion is key for me to get into the air. As a side note, another program used is FSFlying School which adds to the Tour De France company. You can add a sound file that plays near the airport and/ or at the airport. So when landing I'll hear a short description of the stage location.  

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I'm also considering buying Air Hauler 2 but more to operate big aircraft such as FSL A320 and Majestci Q400.

For the GA aircraft I think FSEconomy does pretty well the stuff.

In Air Hauler is it possible to start directly with an A320 or a Q400 or do you have to play for month before being able to buy / lease that kind of Aircraft ?

Does the Majestic Q400 works flawlessly with Air Hauler without any needs of black magic tricks ? (the fact that the Q400 operate "outside" of the P3D engine make it tricky to work with client like FSE that reads data from P3D directly so I suspect it might be the same with Air Hauler 2)

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What I found when I tried Air Hauler2 was that if I didn't play it for a week or two I'd come back to massive bills. Is there a way of managing this? I don't have the time to play 24/7 or even every day.

 

Jim Harris

 

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18 hours ago, Bushido5 said:

I'm also considering buying Air Hauler 2 but more to operate big aircraft such as FSL A320 and Majestci Q400.

For the GA aircraft I think FSEconomy does pretty well the stuff.

In Air Hauler is it possible to start directly with an A320 or a Q400 or do you have to play for month before being able to buy / lease that kind of Aircraft ?

Does the Majestic Q400 works flawlessly with Air Hauler without any needs of black magic tricks ? (the fact that the Q400 operate "outside" of the P3D engine make it tricky to work with client like FSE that reads data from P3D directly so I suspect it might be the same with Air Hauler 2)

There are numerous start options when you create your Air Hauler company. The choice affects how much money you start out with, what reputation you have, and what aeroplane you have. You can start with a little Cessna or some such with little money and a poor reputation, or start with wads of cash, a high reputation level and a four-engined airliner, and pretty much all points in between. But, it will let you immediately sell the airliner you start with and then you have the cash to buy your preferred airliner. You can also borrow money from the bank to buy equipment, but how much you can borrow will depend on your reputation. So, it is certainly possible to start out on day one, sell the Lockheed Constellation, then use the cash to buy or lease your preferred aircraft. From that point on it is up to you to make cash and improve your reputation, add to your fleet, open bases, hire and fire pilots to fly your additional airliners etc.

Any aircraft you have installed can be imported into the Air Hauler interface and it then become available for your company to purchase or lease, and will occasionally also show up for sale 'second hand' via private sellers, which can be cheaper than leasing or buying one new, but the aircraft may be a long way from your base and might also be in poor condition, necessitating repairs. It only takes a couple of seconds to import anything you have installed in your simulator. When you import an airliner into the Air Hauler GUI, it is simply a case of pointing the browser to its config file, but upon import, Air Hauler will take a guess at the range, fuel consumption, capacity etc of the aeroplane, and if you don't like its guess, you can alter it. This means you might have to look up online what the range or capacity of the airliner is so you can put the correct info in, but it is very simple to do that. Once the aircraft is in there, it will appear on the screens for you to buy, lease etc.

I've never had a problem with any aeroplane in Air Hauler 2 working just fine, and that has included a lot of payer aeroplanes including: A2A's Piper Commanche, FSL A320, PMDG 737 NG, iFly 737 NG, PMDG 747, iFly 747, PMDG DC-6, JF DC-6, JF Trinidad and Tobago, JF DC-8, JF BAC 1-11, Flight Replicas DC-4, ATL-98 and Argonaut, Virtualcol CRJ, Virtualcol ATR-42& ATR-72, AeroSim 747-400D, Aerosol 777 etc, so you can see that it's not likely to be an issue with pretty much any aeroplane. 

I did just once have an issue with one aeroplane in the original Air Hauler years ago (can't remember what aeroplane it was, but I think it might have been something like the cargo capacity being wrong on the Just Flight DC-3 or some such), so I went on the Air Hauler forums and contacted the Air Hauler developer (Slopey), he tweaked the program and sorted the problem and released a patch literally the following day so it would work, but, in the interim, he told me a quick workaround which would get it working immediately. This is one of the reasons why I am such a strong advocate of both Air Hauler, its developer, and Just Flight (its publisher), because you get a level of support which puts other developers to shame.

26 minutes ago, Domestos said:

What I found when I tried Air Hauler2 was that if I didn't play it for a week or two I'd come back to massive bills. Is there a way of managing this? I don't have the time to play 24/7 or even every day.

Jim Harris

 

The way around that is to buy a small airliner (I use the Cessna Citation CJ4), and set up a regular scheduled passenger route which makes perhaps 8 flights a day between somewhere such as London and Paris, and set it up to operate seven days a week. A route like that will make at least 2,000 Dollars per flight, so if you times that by eight flights per day, that's 16,000 Dollars per day, times 30, gives you 480,000 Dollars a month. You can buy a CJ4 in the sim for about 1.2 million Dollars, which means it will pay for itself in less than three months. You will of course have fuel costs, AI crew costs, landing fees maintenance and such to pay, but the profit from the route will more than cover those costs. I have three such schedules set up in Air Hauler with three CJ4s that do nothing other than fly those AI schedules for me, which means I could easily leave Air Hauler 2 untouched for a couple of weeks and then fire it up, and it'd simply update with how much money I'd made. You will need to build a base at both airports you want to fly a route between, and that will take a couple of days to complete, but once you have that in place, you can simply set up one day of flight schedules and then copy and paste it to every day of the week.


Alan Bradbury

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I have AH1 and one aspect I don' like is the game clock runs even when the game is shut down.  Does AH2 work this way as well?


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