I have installed Holger Sandmann's AI Helicopter 101 Jet Ranger Starter Kit. I have not been able to observe any AI 206b aircraft to date. Holger has suggested a number of possibilities for me to investigate and, having done so, I now think I am messing up in the TT area. Hence posting here. I use TT Traffic Magician. The only thing I can think of that might be an indication of my problem is that the Airport.bak file does not show the heliports (CYV2 for example) whereas the Airport.txt file does. I note also that the CYVR position minutes differ in both files. Should both the bak and txt files be identical? Any assistance would be welcome. Thanks.Gary (CAM3) :-rotor PS:All other fixed wing AI traffic appears normal

I don't use TT Magician, so I can't help you there. What you could do is open up flightplans.txt and copy the AI Helicopter lines from that into a post so we can see what it did to them. Holger's package has a text file containing the flightplans that should match pretty closely.My guess is, the aircraft.txt file is OK. For most applications that use them, .bak files are simply copies of the original file. So, if you've updated airports.txt, the airports.bak should be exactly as you've described.Also, you need to look at aircraft.txt to make sure that the helicopters are there. Holger's package also has a text file that has aircraft descriptors, and that should be copied into the aircraft.txt file.Can you run TTools manually? If you get errors, they will help a lot in figuring out what the problem is.

Thanks, Capt. BB ( like the user name - reminds me of my navy years) I now have used TTools manually and get no errors. Have compared Holger's files line by line for Aircraft,Airport, and Flightplans and can find no error. I put together a 22kb file containing extracted pertinent lines from my decompiled files and will send these to Holger if he desires. Hate to be bothering him though as I'm sure he has more important things to do than mess around with someone who is probably making some stupid mistake. Doesn't seem like others are having this problem. Maybe my computer is rebelling. :-violin

It took me a while to get this working, mainly because I thought I was smart enough not to read the instructions. After a while, I got all the model and texture files downloaded, and all the aircraft.cfg files set up correctly, and it worked, just like it would have if I had sat down and did what I was told.Now, do you have AITM? If so, you should see your helicopters in that if you select Aircraft Editor. Also, you should see them in the Timetables section for your new heliports. This is a pretty good check that things are set up OK. If you don't have AITM, what are you waiting for? It's a small free download that's worth it's weight in gold. (Philosophical question: how much does a few hundred kilobytes weigh?)Note that given the default downloads you will NOT see your AI helicopters in the Select Aircraft window from FS2002. They are not set up to be user-flyable, only AI.