Overview & Background

• NEC H7101k running an Intel® Pentium® D Processor 820 (2.80GHz, 2X1M L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB),
• 2GB/533MHz DDR2 (4 X 512MB)
• 200Gb SATA HD (7200 RPM)
• MSI 7900GTO (512MB) graphics card
• Sony wide screen LDV TV

The on screen working area of Air Hauler is broken down into 2 tabs called Main Menu and Options. Under Main Menu there are 4 sections. The first grouping of options is 'Jobs' and here I was able to see what was currently on my job list, add to it with new jobs and keep track of the jobs I had completed. The second area is 'Company' where I managed my day to day operations. This includes the financials and operating requirements such as aircraft leases, fuel pricing, insurance, employees, my fleet and bases of operations. While that may sound like allot and had the potential to be complicated in reality it wasn't because the interface is simple enough its really obvious what it is you are looking at. The next section is the 'Marketplace' where I could lease or buy aircraft and recruit or sack staff. The final section deals with 'Stocks' which tracks my share portfolio, if I have one, as well as the markets in general. The interface is clean and easy to use hence why I didn't worry about the manual too much at the start. It has an intuitive feel and with the tabs for each section making it clear what you can do, the fun of running your business is not impeded by the process in which you do it. An extensive help file is available under the last tab.

The Options screen is where you can change all aspects of how Air Hauler will work. Aircraft performance, the way Air Hauler generates jobs and the distance they are from your bases as well as there frequency can be modified with easy to use slide bars. I was able to modify settings that would effect FSX by having Air Hauler pause FSX 30NM from my destination, a very handy feature for those longer flights and you want to go to the toilet. I chose to add height call-outs on approach ( 100, 50, 40, 30 , 20, 10) and a minimums call out (you can set the altitude this call-out happens at) and various options around loading the aircraft. I went for the  automated approach so everything was done once FSX started but you can get down to the detail if you want and manually load the cargo and fuel for each aircraft and trip through the normal load option windows within FSX. Air Hauler will also import add-on scenery into its database so you can use your sceneries as well as any aircraft you have in your FSX hangar. The thing with this is you can't just start using a 747 from day one, you still have to be able to afford to buy it and then operate it, but it does mean you have the flexibility to work up. I know one chap who is using Boeings Dreamlifter so there are no limitations on what you can do. One of the last things I did before I started was to set a parking location at Paraparaumu so when Air Hauler loads FSX I was parked in the spot I wanted to be outside my base.

ARNZX Cargo

Like all businesses Air Hauler is about making money and growing. To do this you need cargo contracts and these are selected under the Jobs Board. Here all the work available is listed and it will show what airport the freight needs to be flown from, what it is, and special information such as is it fragile, where its going too, how much the job is worth and when the job expires. I started with an easy flight from my base at NZPP carrying 893 kg of live sheep to New Plymouth. BAAAA! Apart from all the sheep shit in my plane things went well, the weather was fine and $6500 later I was back AT NZPP feeling quite pleased with myself. The process of setting up a flight is very simple. I click the job I am interested in and on the map to the right of my screen a red line connects the start and destination airports. I am given information on distance, weather and what sort of fees I am going to pay for landing and taking on fuel, so I can then plan in advance to either fly light or fuel up for a return trip. I could select as many or few jobs as I wished but needed to be mindful of the contract expiry time, miss this and you not only loose money but your credibility within the industry is effected and your rating will fall, get it right and it goes up.

Once my jobs were selected a flight planner came up that allowed me to select the order in which I would fly my trips. This highlights the revenue gathering flights and what are positioning flights for the next job and next to this is a map so I could see exactly where I was going. Once I clicked OK the flight plan was generated as well as a flight briefing that I could print or save. My final task before FSX was started and I could fly was to load fuel and freight if applicable at the airport I was starting from. I tried to make as many flights revenue gathering as possible for obvious reasons so how I planned jobs and then my flightplan was a big influence on fuel consumption and thus cost. Once I was ready to go I clicked Ok - Fly Now and the flight monitor screen came up. At this point FSX started automatically and I found myself sitting in my plane at the predetermined parking spot ready to go. Air Hauler uses mission style text boxes to communicate with you in flight, so I was told to start-up, taxi and take-off. Air Hauler creates a GPS flightplan from the information I had entered in the screens earlier and this is loaded automatically so the flight is preconfigured but you are free to fly manually or modify the plan as you go just as you are in any other flight. I taxied as instructed and took off and was then advised to fly to my destination. I allowed the AP to do the work and took over for the approach and landing. When a message came up on landing that it was OK I didn't think much of it, but every subsequent landing brought a new message, some complementing my smooth landing informing me it was a 'Greaser' to another advising my landing had been heavy and I had broken something on the plane. I found these messages to be consistent with my flying and landing skills so they were not random. I learnt the hard way at one airfield where I caused $80K worth of damage to the aircraft so my flying style changed substantially when I realized I was indeed being monitored. This is an important point because while Air Hauler is a business sim, it forces you to take the flying side of things allot more seriously particularly when it hits your bottom line and like any airline nobody wants to use you if you are not safe.

Each leg of the flight ends once you are parked and the engine is switched off. At this point I was able to offload cargo and the loadmaster at the airport received it thus completing my sortie. I then either loaded cargo for my next destination or prepared to reposition the aircraft for my next revenue gathering flight. The interaction between Air Hauler and FSX is smooth and allows a seamless flow between the two so you can carry out the business functions and fly. At the conclusion of the contracts on my job list, and this was typically when I arrived back in Paraparaumu, a final confirmation screen is displayed and a Job Report for each leg of the journey with detailed information on expenditure and any costs associated with the flight. These could be saved or printed for future reference if I wished. There are some sounds that play here, either clapping and cheering when I successfully completed a job or boo's when I did not. Then it was back to the Air Hauler screens and the opportunity to see how my little foray into cargo flying had paid off.

The amount of information you can look at relating to each flight and contract is very broad. Most of it is in the form of graphs with information broken down into revenue and cargo types, and as I expanded so this did to reflect more pilots and aircraft. After my first few flights and my 'heavy' landing I decided to invest in aircraft insurance. Its not cheap but much better than paying $80K.

Expanding the Empire

Being in business is one thing but ruling an aviation empire is much more my style, and Air Hauler allows anyone to satisfy his or her inner cravings for power. What I'm trying to say is I reached a point where I was ready to expand so leased myself a second Cessna C208 and recruited a pilot to go with it. I was now in the position to fly double the amount of flights and potentially double my income. Recruiting a pilot was easy enough, I clicked on Marketplace, Flight Crew and was then presented with a list of candidates their rank and monthly salary. A side note here that you can only recruit pilots once your rating reaches 55%. I selected a young chap by the name of Niamh White with a current ranking of CPL ME/IR who was rated to a MTOW of 25000 who earns just under $3K a month. Setting up an AI pilot on a cargo run is no different than flying it yourself, you select the contract but then click fly job with AI crew, specify the aircraft and flight plan and then a button called 'Go For It'. Air Haukler allows you to monitor their progress regarding what they are up to so you can be assured they are not slacking off. One thing I did find out the hard way with AI crew is you need to be careful about job expiry times. If the job expires in only a few hours then they are never going to make it, so I had to select wisely and assign them on the longer haul flights with plenty of time. As it was 'Niamh' failed his second flight so I wasn't impressed, and after a 'discussion' in my office about expectations I sent him on another flight. Yes you can sack employees but I never got to that point. Now having a second pilot is great but of course you need another plane. For this I went into Market/Lease-Buy New Aircraft. Now while the shiny new 737-800 looked lovely at $40,000,000 it was slightly out of my price range at the time. Even to lease it was going to cost me over 5 Million to put a deposit down and then another 2.3 Million a month in lease costs. I begrudgingly settled for a second C208 at just over $70K a month with a $150k deposit and this time ensuring it was my ARNZX Cargo skinned aircraft. Once sorted I was able to easily get Niamh working across the network. One of the handy features under Jobs/Jobs Board is the ability to see where your pilots and aircraft are located. A couple of tick boxes allow you to turn on and off icons on the map, very handy for when you are trying to figure out what contract to take next based on fleet availability. I progressed to 3 pilots and 3 aircraft towards the end of my time for this review so I found people and fleet management became more important. I wont tell you about the time I managed to locate a pilot and his plane in two different places....DOH! Like me my pilots also improved in rank as they flew successful sorties and the time came to expand further, this time with a new base the question I had was where.

I had made the conscious decision to stay in the North Island so settled on NZNE as my second base location. Part of this decision was driven by cost but more so was the location and ability to service the top half of the North Island that had provided considerable work to date. This ended up being an excellent managerial decision because suddenly my work opportunities exploded and the first international option appeared in the form of Lord Howe Island. My master plan was to have a pilot and aircraft situated in the north, west and South of the North Island plying their regions so I could make some fast cash and I would sit back in my office and smoke expensive cigars getting rich of the back of my pilots. Ok, that's not quite true but it is an avenue you can follow if you wish but to me seems a waste of time given Air Hauler integrates with FSX suggesting some form of flying activity. What I wanted to do was keep revenue ticking over while I dabbled in the Stock Market. I decided to invest in Boeing shares and bought 30,000 of them at just over $38K all up. Great I thought, lets make some easy money. I was somewhat distraught when I discovered my share value had already fallen by $700 on the first day. She'll be right I said they will bounce back, this is a long term investment I said. When I checked them this evening they had fallen again and I was loosing just over $2000. All those years I said 'if it aint a Boeing I'm not going', maybe I was wrong all along! I looked up EADS and Airbus but couldn't find anything listed, neither was Air New Zealand or Qantas. The markets were a bit of fun, well I'm consoling myself and putting on a brave face to be honest but as a component of running a business they are certainly an option as a revenue stream through investment. Plenty of companies covering many industry types are available so your choices are vast. The fact you can track a number of stock exchanges like the DOW, NYSE, FTSE 100 and Nasdaq in real time is a real bonus. The same applies for fuel prices if you have decided to follow the real world price. All these things add up to adding a layer of realism to your operation but as I said earlier this is fully configurable to suit your own preferences as a business owner. Naturally as you add pilots and aircraft and the operation expands so the data provided within Air Hauler at the conclusion of each flight increases. I found it really interesting to track the cargo types and revenue generated by each pilot. The summary of my financial situation was also interesting because here my reputation was also tracked and what I discovered is my rep went down the more flights my AI pilots flew, so only I could influence this and did so positively each time by around a percentage point.

One of the other very handy abilities Air Hauler provides is being able to export every aspect of your operation and the information associated with it to Excel. This feature is clearly aimed at people who want to take their Air Hauler business a little more seriously than the average user and do some more in depth analysis of the operation. The fact its been included is a signal that it takes itself seriously and certainly in my view needs to be considered as a viable tool to teach younger people, and some older ones, how a business actually operates. The reality is Air Hauler is the type of add-on that a review simply wont do justice too. All I can give you is a snapshot of my experience and try and provide some insight into the many layers of functionality and depth it has. I really enjoyed the experience and think the challenge of operating a business in a flight sim environment adds a depth you simply can't get in other ways. The interaction between the various parts of the operation was quite fascinating especially once I had pilots on board. I chose to get quite involved with the operation so there were times I experienced real stress when I was trying to coordinate pilots, aircraft, contracts and expenses, particularly when the stock echange was not being nice to me 'when do I sell, when do I sell'.

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