I’m glad to see others posting about the importance of a customizable tail number on 3rd Party add-on aircraft…a standard feature in MSFS 2020. Many 3rd Party aircraft publishers have disabled this feature, and offer only fixed tail numbers on their liveries. This also stops 3rd party livery makers from offering a customizable tail number on their liveries.
And for me, this is a show stopper. I won’t buy any more 3rd Party aircraft if the publisher hasn’t enabled the customizable tail number feature in MSFS 2020.
With an airline and flight # specified, what you hear isn’t the actual ATC ID from the config. It’s just like you had American 1123 specified instead. Delete the airline and flight entries and ATC will read the ATC ID. If you have one specified, it’ll read that, otherwise, it’ll read what’s in the ATC_ID line in the cfg. It took me about five minutes to go through 41 entries in the first folder.
Note that if this ever goes to the Marketplace, this edit will not be possible.
I’ll edit the other three cfg files tomorrow. It’s almost 0200 here…
Custom tail numbers are only enabled on factory paints. The four custom ones don’t support this because the position, colour and don’t of the tail numbers is unique to the livery.
Unfortunately, the MSFS feature to change font & colour doesn’t work and changing the position is impossible without making a separate model.
So 36/40 support custom numbers, 4/40 do not.
For the campaign and custom tail number to work, when selecting a plane in the menu select the ATC tab and you will be able to change them.
Specifying an airline and flight number on the other 36 overrides that ATC registration. It’s the same as specifying American 1123 for a Boeing jet. Regardless of what tail number is displayed on the tail or in the cockpit, ATC will always use the airline and flight first.
I also decided to change the IsAirTraffic= lines on all of them to 0 because everywhere I parked, practically all I could see was Kodiaks. Then I went into the sim and cherry-picked 5 (three without and 2 with the cargo pod) to set back to being useable by AI. I set those entries back to 1, so I’ll have a few scattered around, but with all of the 45 variants that were set to AI use, it looked like there were more Kodiaks parked at an airport than have ever been built!
I didn’t want to change it. I wanted to remove custom one from the sim and only keep the one that came with the paint.
I figured it out in the meantime by myself. You need to change the panel line (line15) in the aircraft.cfg to „…\SWS_Kodiak_gear\panel.noregistration“
This was the problem on a couple of the repaints I downloaded from flightsim.to.