So last year I started to get into Air Hauler for X-Plane - which is a great utility for adding some purpose to your X-Plane flying. If Air Hauler (AH) existed in a vacuum, I would probably still be plying away on that career. Unfortunately, I was let in on the Early Access of Air Hauler 2 (AH2), which is being developed exclusively for FSX/P3D. The developer has made it clear under no uncertain terms, that he will not be developing AH2 for X-Plane because sales of AH for X-Plane were not very good, and he doesn’t particularly seem to care for X-Plane as a platform. It is devastating news for an X-Plane fan who would prefer to fly all things X-Plane, made even worse after poking around with a very full featured AH2 (despite being termed “early access”) and wishing we could eventually see these things in an X-Plane version. Based on the developer’s comments, it is not looking very bright for an X-Plane version.
Having no other choice (well, a lesser choice I feel with AH for X-Plane), I’ve elected to go forward with an AH2 career using P3D v3. When I initially expressed an interest, I had been hoping to base my AH2 company out of Papua New Guinea (PNG) with ORBX’s awesome bush scenery package. Unfortunately, there are some obstacles to this, mostly owing to the fact that much of the PNG scenery is very customized and “painted” onto the mesh, which means the airfields aren’t recognized by AH2 as actually being airfields (thus, you’d never get tasked to fly to them). There are some workarounds such as injecting custom airfield definitions into your sim database, but the hassle factor seemed greater than what it was worth. As well, the PNG area would be 95% VFR flying, whereas I’d like to do some hard IFR flying as well.
After batting around some possible areas to open my AH2 company - I settled on an area that is totally foreign to me, but which has excellent supplemental scenery to add to the immersion - Norway! Using the ORBX Norway package, featuring over 135 airports and tons of custom scenery, I hope to build up my company, see some interesting places around Norway and Sweden, and try not to damage any airplanes while flying some of the notoriously challenging approaches to some of the regions tight airfields. I’ll be writing up a feature article on AH2 in the near future, so I might gloss over some of the finer details of AH2 operations, but we will circle back to them in the near future.
First things first - I go through the multitude of AH2 setup pages to create my company and make selections on starting capital, airfield location, and a few other items. Since I’m in it for the long haul, I go with the most restrictive setting - “CAREER” - which gives me the least amount of cash on hand, the lowest reputation, and a basic aircraft. The premise of AH2 is, of course, to earn money, invest that money in larger aircraft that can haul more goods and passengers, upgrade facilities, lease larger airports, and even hire pilots and play the stock market. The options and functionality of AH2 are dizzying and it is much more than a random mission assignment program.
My starting base location will be Stord (ENSO) due to the fact that it is a relatively cheap opening cost and a manageable monthly lease ($5055). Larger, more capable airports with multiple runways and navigation facilities can cost upward of $100,000 of your cash to open, so it is best to start small and accept the limited facilities.
I immediately sell my A36 Bonanza, netting a shade over $138,000 for it - which I’m then able to use to purchase my first aircraft - the default Maule M7 260C, which costs me around $168,000, but I really like that airplane. An entire new and used aircraft market exists where you can buy and sell aircraft, lease aircraft, and buy aircraft that other AH2 pilots have listed in various states of repair. AH2 tracks your fleet airworthiness and you have to do inspections, make repairs, and of course buy fuel and other consumables.
Once you buy an aircraft, you need to prove your proficiency by buying a type rating - a simple test flight that makes you prove you can get the beast airborne, follow some simple vectors and altitude changes, and return to a safe landing…
Despite being one of the older aircraft, and being default with just a bit of sprucing up with a slightly higher res panel mod being applied, the Maule is a really cool aircraft…
The type rating test is kind of odd in that it doesn’t pick “cardinal” altitudes or headings, but it is mostly a formality anyway…
After a short period of air work, it is back to the airport for the landing, which must meet a certain criteria - no prangers here!
On the downwind - trying to remember how best to fly a piston aircraft…
My “home” strip of Stord is a beautiful airport with a choice of RNAV, LOC, and VOR approaches for when the weather gets uncooperative. I’ll be running real weather via Active Sky Next for all of my flying…
The landing goes well and I taxi back to the ramp to shut down…
All went well and now I have my type rating and am ready to start finding jobs…!
In the next AAR - we’ll take a look at my first revenue flight…
