AIG has been kind of frustrating for me.

First was the learning curve, then it was the loading times and overall general user-friendliness (but hey, its free)

Then, I was greedy and simply chose all of the available airlines and downloaded them, which in retrospect, was silly, as loading times became so high that I nearly gave up on the whole thing.

This got me wondering what others are doing.

Downloading the whole thing? Choosing only the aircraft needed for specific routes? Specific countries?

Are there any airlines that are considered must haves?

Recently I punted, and took a look at an online airline list and just chose those. So far, It seems to be working well, especially with loading times, but have I missed some essentials?

Is this a good list? https://www.seatguru.com/browseairlines/browseairlines.php

I have it all, but I love and always loved the accurate AI. You have the option to do whatever you want. 

Are you referring to the load times of AIGTC? Personally, I don't load AIGTC until I'm in the main menu of MSFS and by the time I'm actually at the airport in the sim the wait is maybe a minute or two. 

 I have all majors and medium carriers installed as well as most smaller operators within Europe and NA.

As I fly worldwide and like my airports to feel and look lively, I selected ALL airlines available.

To save time - and contrary to what I have read several times regarding the necessity to load TC only after you reach your cockpit, I start AIG TC immediately after setting up my flight in MSFS, and while it loads my aircraft and scenery to the "FLY" screen, this way, most of the time, my traffic already populate the apron or very shortly after I click on FLY.

I am extremely pleased with AIG which I never used before with P3D or FSX, this is a discovery for me and an excellent one! Kudos to the team!

I have it all as:

• I (currently) have a ton of free SSD space
• I never know where I'm gonna fly in the World so it's handy to have them all

13 minutes ago, MarcG said:

I have it all as:

• I (currently) have a ton of free SSD space
• I never know where I'm gonna fly in the World so it's handy to have them all

When going through the actual online list, I noted quite a few airlines that just seemed a bit irrelevant, as in, never heard of them and doubt I would ever see them at anyplace I was likely to fly. Food chains and other oddities....

I suspect few would miss them, and there appeared to be many airlines that seemed like vanity planes from some company that probably only had one or two of them....

I was also looking at Simple Traffic, and its list of planes, which numbers less than 200 (but seems representative) as opposed to the nearly 1500 listed in AIG.

Edited March 1, 20224 yr by HiFlyer

I hit CTRL-A and OCI-Bulk install.

But, If I was going to use a stripped down install,  (In NO particular order)

British Airways

Air France

Air Canada

Lufthansa

United

American

Delta

Southwest

Alaskan

Jet Blue

Frontier -  Their aircraft have liveries with wild animals on the vertical stabs

Aer Lingus

Virgin Atlantic

DHL - UPS - FedEx

Quantas

Alitalia

Ethiad - Emirates - Qatar

Azul 

New Zealand

Hawaiian

Edited March 1, 20224 yr by Waldo Pepper

One way to chose would be to select airlines with the most aircraft. That way you'd have a chance of accurate representation, though it would obviously also depend where you are flying.

From Statista.com:

I started with 50 FPs, then the server went down. After the server came back up I downloaded 50 more.

I gave up on AIG. I spent more time updating TC and verifying files, than I did enjoying the beautiful models. Maybe it was the growing pains that we had to go through for us to enjoy it. I still have it and will use it again when the server issues are sorted.

I forgot to mention that I even used the GA mod and fps were acceptable.

Edited March 1, 20224 yr by DJJose

All of it.  Took several hours but totally worth it.

Also have GA running pretty well with the mod that Phantom suggested.

I've also gone back and forth between using AIG's Traffic Controller, and PSXT/RT.  The latter is really cool for plane spotting while listening to ATC ... at certain airports like LAX, WHHH, EGLL.  Others not as much, but this is more a limitation of the way Real Traffic works.  Pilots turn off their transponders in some places like small airfields, and its somewhat non-existant in places like China.  Also, in places where there is a large final correction on final, like Reagan National, RT's update misses this and planes look like they're landing in the water.

With AIG TC, you dont have those issues, but its not live and you see a lot of the weirdness of MSFS's AI (a lot of go arounds, planes pulling onto the runway when another is on short final, planes spinning donuts, etc).  But even despite those issues, it can still work 'well enough' that there is fun plane spotting to be had and you feel like you're at an active airport.

Things are moving in the right direction at least.

All the major airlines, i don't see any issues other than a initial extended load time by a few minutes, other than that all good.

In MSFS I have them all installed.  I love seeing a wide variety of AI everywhere in the world so it’s worth it for me.

Having said that, I recently reinstalled P3Dv5 for the sole purpose of flying the Majestic Q400 and decided to do a “mini-install” of AIG back into P3D so I installed all of the Canadian airlines I could find, most US airlines and any other large international airline that I might see at an airport in Canada. This was based on where I expected I would be flying the Q400.

Edit: Also most international cargo airlines as they can show up just about anywhere.

Edited March 1, 20224 yr by regis9

I initially selected around 60 airlines - all the major ones around the globe with large fleets. Then I looked at where I like to fly… mostly Europe, USA and Australia/NZ. So using Wikipedia, I searched for the airlines servicing specific airports in those regions and downloaded all of those to be sure I got max variety at those airports. I probably have around 200 installed now. Definitely not planning to install all of them but I will add to the list over time I’m sure. I also run the GA traffic mod/fix so I have GA traffic too.

I installed only US airlines and freight. Sometimes i download airlines when i decide to go to a country that i want to discover.

Since I usually fly from the EWR area, I look at all the airlines that come into EWR, JFK and LGA and get those. If I go out of country then I'll pick up major airlines that fly from the hubs there (eg RKSI, RJAA, EGLL, LFPG, HAAB, etc...)

Its fun seeing different liveries and aircraft types when you go to other countries. The load time is what it is as I have to set aside time to fly anyway.