Plane Spotting in MSFS

[ZooMotorPool]

As an airliner enthusiast, my other hobby besides flying commercial routes is to take a moment and gaze upon the destination airport activities.

My homebase is WIII - Soekarno-Hatta Intl Airport (CGK), but in simulator, my second home is RJTT - Tokyo Haneda Intl Airport (HND), and has been my go-to since 2019 with X-Plane 11. Asobo did a very great rendition of HND, combined with a lot of add-ons and amazing AI traffic by AIG, it came alive.

Here is me, admiring Atarium’s amazing JAL Dreamliner livery on Kuro’s 787-8. I flew it all the way from Seoul (RKSS - Gimpo Intl Airport) and park it in HND’s international Terminal 3.

Showing you the sparse T3 - there is a Bombardier Global Express from NetJets Europe parked at one of the stands.

Airports MSFS is pretty hard to work with, especially parking assignments. In real life, T3 Haneda hosts all kinds of international flights, including those flown by JAL and ANA. But, you can’t specify parking based on origin airports, only by airlines, otherwise, domestic airliners will start flocking to T3 as well.

T3 is occupied by foreign airlines by default, and each airline have a very specific gate assignment. The AAL, GIA, and QFA always spawn within the same gate (which is also pretty accurate in real life). Note the very visible Mount Fuji in the background. A pretty common sight in Japanese unpleasantly hot and humid summer.

However, such classification can produce amazing results, which MSFS can correctly place JAL & its groupies like Skymark and Starflyer in T1:

Pretending to “spot” a from outside the fence here:

As expected, T2 also gets correct gate assignments too, with Air Do, sometimes Solaseed, and obviously ANA, occupying them:

The perks of using AIG solutions is the ability to get specific liveries. Shown here are 2 Star Wars-themed ANA jets (C-3PO and R2-D2), there is also ANA flower jet 737-800 that love to occupy the Air Do’s spot.

Now, sometimes you got unexpected behaviour from the AI, I don’t know why or how, but might be AIFlow & AIGround interference, but this is ANA 20, 5th flight of the day that connects between Osaka (RJOO / Itami) and Tokyo (RJTT / Haneda), seen exitting runway 22:

Oh well, the ATC instructed it to park in T3, and here is how the guy did it:

Take a look at those control surface drooping when the engine was shut down. I just wished AAU2 bring the same detail to Asobo’s 787.

Well, that’s it for my own Haneda of the day. It was a very clear sky today, as in the real world weather report as well. How do you fix your plane spotting cravings in MSFS? Please do share!

[NeoKingRthur]

Nice to meet someone else whose home base is WIII as well. Hahahah.

I do my planespotting using the free FSLTL. I already changed to it from AIG before.

[anon44786522]

Hopefully you still use AIG as a backfill for missing airliners/liveries. Now with the FAIB models being able to be converted for MSFS you’re going to want to keep AIG updated once that’s done since it brings in and covers A LOT of what is currently missing from FSLTL’s base pack. Everything that is missing within FSLTL is already covered by AIG.

[anon44786522]

To the thread topic:
Being a fellow AI junkie I get my plane spotting needs through just watching the flows around the airport. If I want ultra realism then I turn on LiveATC and PSXT and can see everything in the sim behaving the same as what’s happening on LiveATC. Back in the day Airnavsystems had this little program for FSX calls FSLive Traffic. It would download a snapshot of the current traffic and convert it into a FSX useable BGL format. I would then load up at JFK and plane spot for a few hours listening to the stock ATC, mainly clearance delivery. The only drawback to that neat program was that after a few hours the traffic would start to get a little dated and I would need to close the sim and redownload a new file. If only that logic can be translated into today’s simulator where it would download every 30 minutes or so it would be amazing. I know that the current live traffic with FA is supposed to do that but it doesn’t do it in a very sim friendly way.

[NeoKingRthur]

Ehh… not really. I mean, I did combine FSLTL with the JustFlight FS Traffic models since the FSLTL injector app is compatible with it. The reason why I fully removed AIG is because how much of a hassle its installation process can become.

I regularly do fresh reinstallation of my Windows 11. And with it comes with the reinstallation of MSFS as well. Sometimes I have long breaks from the sim and with it I uninstall MSFS from my PC only for it to reinstall it again when it’s time for me to jump back in.

The problem with AIG is we have to select which airline to download. And we have to do it one at a time. Not to mention if it fails to automatically download a file you’ll need to sit in front of your computer and manually download the zip file that it fails before continuing.

It took me literally 3 hours, just so that I can download all the models and liveries for the airlines who have routes to my WIII homebase airport. And if I want to fly in Europe, or America, or any other Asian countries, I have to manually search for their airline and do the entire 6 hour process of downloading each of them all over again.

I know we can just “select” which liveries and airlines to download. But I tried to select all liveries, and after 3 straight days of downloading and me having to respond to its request to redownload the files, it just becomes too much of a hassle for me to do it all the time.

FSLTL at least can just click once and I can leave my PC with a peace of mind knowing that everything it has can be downloaded without manual intervention. And yes, while I know it doesn’t have “everything” yet the same way that AIG does. It has “most” airliner models that I can safe to say that it’s good enough for me to start flying anywhere in the world.

I’m not sure if AIG has made some improvement in its content delivery process lately. If AIG can just pool everything into a single server and we can download them in bulk as a single file without the whole thing being done one at a time. That’s much more preferable.

For me, 1x 100 GB file of all liveries and model in a single file download where we can just extract into the community folder and it can just “work” is a much better process than waiting for the app to install one livery at a time.

PS. I actually found new airline liveries that are in FSLTL but not in AIG…

[ZooMotorPool]

Nice to see fellow IndoFlyer!

For me FSLTL has a lot of glaring omissions in special liveries (especially basic ones like alliance billboards), or specific models that is just a no-no for AI spotters. AIG despite having “One-Click Installer” (OCI), is still terribly complex, due to them respecting copyrights from repainters that can no longer be contacted for permission (you have to download their works manually as a consequence). FSLTL bypassed this hurdle by repainting everyting by themselves. Due to resource limitations, obviously they can’t cover every specific liveries or select the appropriate models.

I can easily showcase it through what’s happening in MSFS LAX this morning:

This is a Southwest 737-700 in standard blended winglet, registered N424WN. And you’d think it would be enough to have all Southwest 737-700s represented this way. But no…

Here is another one with split-scimitar winglet, registered N7868K. And it just doesn’t stop there. You can also see American Airlines’ A320 with some historic background, like those acquired through America West’s IAE-engined buses, which was acquired by US Airways, which then merged with American Airlines. FSLTL simply put all of their AAL Airbus narrowbodies CFM-powered.

Now this is spotting something really “special”

N162AA’s special livery “Stand Up To Cancer”

Yes, this is IniBuild’s KLAX, and it is shockingly very light, despite my expectations. The Haneda one is much laggier than this.

The MAX, sporting older colours, and another one sporting newer liveries.

It depends on your situation, whether you find it worth the complicated AIG installer thing, or simply stick with FSLTL - which works flawlessly with online flying model matching.

[anon44786522]

Not really correct. AIG and AIGM has an option to bulk install. You just have to check multiple airlines and then click “OCI-bulk” and it’ll install all of the airlines you selected. It’s easy to overlook that if you don’t look at things carefully but there’s no reason you have to do it one-by-one. It’s been that way for a long time.

AIG offers you the option to install everything (assuming you have space), but you can select global airlines, GA, or cargo. That will install everything as a bulk function based on the type of AI you want.

The install process already extracts everything into the community folder. That’s where AIG AIGM installs everything if it detects you’re using MSFS. So again, there’s no need to download and copy everything over. It’s already in the community folder to begin with. You can see that here:

Everything AIG-aitraffic___ is treated as an addon. Thus you’re able to use it with both MSFS Live Traffic and FSLTL and I also confirmed that if you’re using Just Flight that their product can also use AIG as well.

Go back and read through the install guide for AIG or at least look around at what some of the other functions do with the OCI because everything you’re saying can’t be done or is too much work can already be done.

One thing that AIG allows you to do that FSLTL or JF can’t is to use lower quality textures which saves on space and performance. I have mine set to install 2K instead of 4K or higher. FSLTL has all of their textures at 8K which is insane and they said they won’t be offering any lower textures. So if anything by using FSLTL/JF you’re going to be sacrificing more performance somewhere whether you think so or not and saying everything is “optimized” can only go so far. The difference between 2K and 4K/8K is not something I ever notice in the sim anyways either. Everything always looks sharp and fresh to me. But then again I’m not zooming in directly on aircraft to count the bolts.

[NeoKingRthur]

I am very well aware of the OCI-Bulk installation option which I can select all in the list and one click and the installer will run in the background and auto-extract them into the community folder. I used this before but it’s still annoying for these reasons:

1. If I bulk install all global airliner liveries. There are literally thousands of them, a lot of which I have never known before or just not applicable to the region I fly the most on. So I’m more at risk of clogging my storage drives with aircraft models and liveries of airlines that I just don’t care to have.

2. Even using the OCI-bulk install. The app still installs and unpacks them one at a time before moving on to the next package. Even on a 1 Gbps connection, this process is very slow and prone to getting stuck in the middle where it needs me to download the file manually, prompt the app that I have downloaded and it can continue to proceed.

Imagine if I have 500 models and liveries to download, if it’s going to take 6 hours to do. There’s no way I’m going to sit in front of my PC waiting for the entire thing to download and unpack, even if the app is installing them in bulk.

Most likely I would just go out to do my other errands or go to sleep hoping that by the time I wake up the entire bulk installation is finished.

So when I leave my PC to go to bed, the next morning I found out that the Bulk install got stuck on one model/livery and it’s waiting for me to manually download the file before the OCI bulk install can continue. Then I found that so far, it has only installed 30 models and liveries before it got stuck that required my manual intervention. The remaining 470 liveries are still on the queue. So all that time was wasted.

I am also well aware of the skip manual download option. But my experience with it is also frustrating. I skips the manual dowload, sure but now I’m missing the liveries, and I would still need to manually download them again.

3. The way that AIG airline “selection” works is really horrible. When I used it last year, there’s no option to filter and select all airlines based on “country” or “region”.

I had to manually look at a list of airlines in my country and search using their airline name for the installer to filter out the others. The reason why I said I had to install it one at a time is because I can’t select or tick one airline and when I use the airline search to show me the other airline, the previous airline got deselected. I can only select multiple airlines if all of them are on the same filter. The moment I change filter, the selected airline got reset and deselected.

It’s frustrating that the only time I can select multiple airlines to be installed in bulk is if it’s showing the “entire list” or airlines. And I have to use my mouse to scroll up and down and jumping all over the place to select them.

So if I use the filter or airline name search I can only select one, install it, then move on to search the next airline, and do it again. It’s frustrating.

Look I’m not criticising AIG or anything. I admit AIG has good quality models and liveries. I used AIG extensively before. Simply because FSLTL wasn’t available at the time yet, so yes I bite the bullet and go through all those annoying process.

But the moment that FLSTL has thousands of the most common liveries from most airlines around the world and it can be achieved by 1 click of 30-minute download without errors. You have to admit that it’s a very user-friendly process.

If AIG can optimise their model and livery delivery into no longer than 1 hours installation process without errors or manual download with centralised CDN. That would be great. Otherwise, it’s not worth my frustration and hassle.

[ZooMotorPool]

I’ve just arrived after 3 hours 30 minutes flight from PER to SYD. It was a beautiful afternoon arrival in southern hemisphere winter, so the sun kind of sets earlier.

Yes, this is FlyTampa’s YSSY, and while they correctly assigned gates for corresponding airlines, they don’t recognise mine, nor distinguish domestic & international arrivals.

Never imagined SYD will be haven to spot for special liveries:

CAL’s Taiwanese indigenous birds series, this one is their Blue Magpie

Classic QANTAS’ aboriginal arts features, this one titled “Balarinji”

And of course, why I vehemently oppose static aircraft is, sometimes, you don’t have to try really hard to spot one of Emirates’ 100+ A380 in major airports, this one is even special-liveried.

[NeoKingRthur]

Unless you know of a place that someone has completely download everything in the AIG Manager in a ready to use traffic models for MSFS, and I can just download the whole package as a single archive file that I can just unzip and use my AIG manager to just “verify” the installation and redownload any missing/updated liveries.

That would speed up the entire process significantly than having to use the AIG Manager to install the models every time.

[Zeanuck]

What better thing is there than doing some plane spotting? Today’s adventure takes us to Boston Logan International. KBOS. All aircraft piloted online on the VatSim network.

Southwest 737 taxis after landing.

Southwest 737 has a little bounce on arrival

American A320 being pushed back

Small GA Cessna C310 makes it way to the active runway

United A320 struggles during take off in gusty winds