Realistic. Innovative. Professional.

We’ve all seen the tag line that MetroAir has subscribed to, but have you ever considered exactly what that means?  I’d like to focus on the element of realistic in this post.

Our CEO, Matt Calsada, spoke some about this a couple of months ago in his blog post Blurring the Lines.  What people may not realize is we attempt to take our realism even farther than that.  When we’re searching for a new aircraft, one of the things we take into consideration is the quality and realism of available freeware and payware models for the aircraft.  Unfortunately, the freeware models aren’t always the most realistic in their flight dynamics.  This is where I go to work.

In order to bring the most realistic aircraft possible to our pilots, there is often a lot of work that goes into creating our aircraft packages.  It starts with research for the aircraft, which includes investigating the manufacturer’s website and technical specifications, other 3rd party websites such as Wikipedia, and FAA certification documents with all specifications on engines, aircraft aerodynamics, etc (if you ever want to stare at more math and graphs then you ever cared to see, head on over to the FAA’s certification website).

From there, editing of the aircraft.cfg and the aircraft’s .AIR file is required to correctly model the engine’s performance at various speeds, lift values, drag, moments of inertia,

center of gravity, weight distribution, etc.  These are all things that are reviewed to make as accurate as possible, and then tested in flight sim using several programs that can read data realtime out of flight sim via FSUIPC to compare against technical specs and certification documents to ensure we’re providing the most accurate aircraft possible to our pilots.  A lot of time goes into the research, editing, and testing of our aircraft in these aspects, so take comfort and enjoy the realism the next time you push the throttle levers forward as you begin your takeoff roll down the runway.