New Repaint Created: AIA B727-100 US Department of Justice (Fleet)

I've created another couple of repaints for the AI Aardvark B727-100. They represent the two aircraft owned by the United States Department of Justice, registration numbers N113 and N530KF. These planes are part of the JPATS fleet (also known as "Con-Air") and are operated by the United States Marshals Service throughout the USA and internationally.

I found several pictures of these planes (1) (2) on airliners.net that I used to lay out the livery. They are basically the same - only the color of the wide stripes and registrations differ. Below are the preview shots; feedback and constructive comments are welcome.

Side note: These aircraft would also look pretty good as generic VIP/business aircraft - at least on the outside. The scenery in these shots is MegaCity Phoenix.

The file is on Avsim: aia_b727-100_usdoj_fleet.zip.

N113:





N530KF:









It took about 2 hours of work until I was happy with the results. The tricky parts were getting the colors right and lining up/scaling the fuselage stripes as they curve upwards in the rear of the aircraft. Tools used: Illustrator, Photoshop, and DXTBMP.

New AFCAD Created: KMZJ (Pinal Airpark/Marana, AZ)

Ever seen pictures of the aircraft boneyards? In addition to Mohave (KMHV) and Victorville (KVCV), there's a big one about 30 miles northwest of Tucson, Arizona. The Pinal Airpark is home to the Evergreen Air Center and has an assortment of planes parked in the desert awaiting their fate. Some are there seasonally, others are in long-term storage, and yet others will be parted out and recycled.

I've created an afcad with 130 parking spots arranged to closely resemble what I saw on Google maps at Pinal airpark. I also put together a traffic file to populate the airport with a selection of 125 AI aircraft I have installed. I made no attempt to match this to any real-world photos, but I think the list is pretty sensible. There won't be any A340-500 aircraft here, for example.

Each aircraft will do VFR touch-and-goes at Marana for 15 minutes two times during the week. These times were generated in Excel and are randomized for each aircraft. That will keep the traffic intensity to a minimum. By removing some of the flightplans, the number of aircraft can be reduced if there's a problem with frame rates.

Note that I didn't create any scenery per se - everything that's here was done with AFCAD 2.21. There is an Army helicopter facility on the north side of the field that I haven't tried to replicate... perhaps at some point in the future I'll put something together.

The file is on Avsim: afcad_kmzj_boneyard.zip.

Here is the full set of screenshots:

New Repaint Created: AIA C-40B USAF

After seeing a request on one of the PAI forums, I created the following repaint. It represents a United States Air Force C-40B, tail number 02-0042. The base model used is AI Aardvark's B737-700 (winglet version).

I found several pictures of this plane on airliners.net that I used to lay out the stripe, tail number, and windows. Below are the screenshots.

The file is on avsim: aia_c40b_usaf_02-0042.zip.







This looks like a pretty simple job, but because I haven't done any AIA repaints yet, I had to familiarize myself with the paintkit first. Once that was done, it was straightforward to reproduce the livery with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

Prologue

Here are a some recent screen shots from a flight I took from San José, Costa Rica (MROC) to Tegucigalpa, Honduras (MHTG). Click on the thumbnails for the full image.

Visible AI Traffic:
AI Aardvark
FSPainter
EvolveAI
Ultimate GA

Our Aircraft:
Project Open Sky (POSKY) B757-200 in United colors
Panel - Ken Mitchell (B757_Panel_NoVC.zip)
Sounds - Devyn Silverstein (pw2000_195750.zip)

Scenery:
MROC - Rodrigo Gonzalez (mrocv2_140221.zip)
MHTG - Henry Carcamo (fly-tegucigalpa_v2.zip)
Mesh - Jozef Kusters sets (multiple)

Screenshots: