Plane spotting yields startling results!

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PLANE SPOTTING YIELDS STARTLING RESULTS!

Some might say I have too much time on my hands but nevertheless I decided out of interest to visit major airports in prominent cities around the world to see what AI aircraft were parked there. I visited 13 airports and used the drone to fly around and note the airliners.

I have detailed the results below and they leave me wondering about the programming involved. Certain major airlines were conspicuous by their absence (British Airways, Emirates, Malaysian), KLM was everywhere and others, according to a Google search, ceased operations years ago!

I have some software which is supposed to allocate airlines to destinations realistically. This clearly was not working because, for instance, QantasLink, a regional airline confined to Australia was spotted in Dallas and Bangkok. Iraqi Airlines was seen in places remote from the Middle East.

Airports visited were Dallas, JFK New York, London Heathrow, London Gatwick, Tokyo Narita, Cologne-Bonn, Vancouver, Toronto, Bangkok, Singapore, Sydney, Sao Paolo and Kuala Lumpur.

Some were well-populated, others sparsely so. Major airports in Canada featured Tunis Air and Iraqi Airways. No sign of Air Canada!

Interestingly I saw aircraft from seven airlines which have ceased operations –

Livingston Italian airline based in Milan. Cease operations (CO) in 2014

Eurofly also based in Milan. CO 2010

air berlin CO 2017

air spain CO 1975!!

Air Mauritius CO 2020

interjet Mexican low cost carrier, CO Dec 2020

Atlas Global Turkish airline CO Feb 2020

It is possible that the last two ceased operations after programming had been completed they can’t really be blamed for that.

TAM merged with the Brazilian LATAM airline in 2012

In conclusion the placement of AI bears little resemblance to reality but in my opinion is still preferable to the “ghost town” airports created by Asobo.

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Are you using AIG Traffic Manager because I don’t see several of the airlines you have listed as CO and haven’t really noticed the issues you describe. If you are using SimpleTraffic, then not sure what the complaint is since it’s not really intended to be all that accurate.

Also keep in mind that an airline might continue to operate under it’s original charter name, but have a different name operationally, which sometimes confuses things.

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Just for your information , Air Mauritius still flies , every day
It is just under curatorship …

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It seems that I was using an outdated AI Offline traffic app. How things change in just a few months!
People recommend the AIG Traffic Manager app but it is so complicated to install that I daren’t risk a total stuffup so I deleted my old app and installed the Aerosoft Simple Traffic payware. Why can’t AIG produce a product that makes installation simple? We are not all computer nerds!

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With Aerosoft Simple Traffic, when you set the sim to display static aircraft, the airlines and liveries are random and not specific to the airport. As far as I remember, this is mentioned in the Simple Traffic manual.

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Is it possible that they used some of the COs because they didn’t need to license the artwork/brand?

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have you tried with this youtube. Worked well for me.

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I watched the YT tutorial and am convinced more than ever not to attempt to install it!

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That’s a shame because you are really missing out on a great product. Yes its time consuming to setup, but once installed it adds so much realism. Unfortunately I had to install the airlines twice as the first time it installed to the official community folder, but I couldn’t move it from there, so had to delete and reinstall to another location because of the 255 character limit in windows. In 2 installations it took 14 hours total time.

That said I wouldn’t be without AIG, It was great for P3Dv5 and its even better for MSFS.

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I am happy for you. I find the Aerosoft Simple Traffic pretty good and let’s face it, the AI traffic is a desirable add-on but the main purpose of FS2020 is ti fly!

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