Advice on paints, whole planes, missing in aircraft list?

[Guest Graebner]

Where might I find advice on a problem that has surely been covered in the fora, but for which I can think of no convenient search term that won't return hundreds of posts?I have a large number--20 or 30--of aircraft folders in C:../flight simulator 9/aircraft/ that do not show up in the aircraft list in FS9. The FSACC utility confirms that they are compliant, at least for the things it tests. Some of the missing planes are add-ons, and some are FS9 stock. What might be the problem?Also, why might some paints for downloaded AI planes not show up? They appear to be in the aircraft's folder, and the plane shows up on screen when and where the flight plans say it should, but it appears with no paint. Some do, some don't, and I have not discovered the difference.Thank you for any advice on where to find postings on these questions.

[Guest Tingoose]

The air file of each aircraft has a setting which dictates whether it will show up in the FS9 aircraft list. As a rule, AI aircraft don't show up whilst flyables do. However, you can edit the airfile of any particular aircraft using one of two programs ('Aired' or 'BBQHide')so that it will show up or not . BBQHide is definitley available in the Avsim library, not sure about Aired. As for textures not displaying, there are a number of possibilities. The obvious one is that the textures files are not present in the texture folder. Other possibilities are that they are there but are the wrong ones. Another is that they are there but have not been compressed to the correct format (DXT3 or 32bit). Yet another is that the texture folder name does not exactly match the texture name entry in the aircraft cfg. There are probably more possibilities but these are the common ones.Hope this helps

[Guest Graebner]

Thank you for your advice.Following one of your suggestions, I eventually solved some of the problems by downloading textures and .mdl files that I knew corresponded. This fixed the planes that appeared unpainted, but did not solve the mystery of the supposedly flyable (indeed, stock FS9) planes that remain invisible. I investigated a bit with AirEd, and found that .air files do have a setting about whether they appear in the aircraft list, but according to the AirEd information window that pops up when you adjust settings, this only affects Combat Flight Simulator AI planes. In any case it was set to make the planes "flyable", and so it does not appear to be what is preventing my stock Lear jets and the stock MD-80 from appearing in the aircraft list.Obviously I will have to do some more digging. Thanks again for your help.Regards,Seth