How to Edit Aircraft CFG

By editing "aircraft.cfg," you could add acrobatic smoke to a huge airliner -- if you wanted.

Microsoft's "Flight Simulator" series of games stores information about an aircraft's behavior and capabilities in a file called "aircraft.cfg." This file is structured like a typical ".ini" file, with sections defined by square brackets and values separated from their name by an equals sign. You can edit "aircraft.cfg" with Windows' built-in text editing software and use it to add new aircraft variants or change the behavior of an aircraft.

Instructions

1. Navigate to your Microsoft Flight Simulator directory; by default, Microsoft's latest Flight Simulator, FSX, installs to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X. Open up the folder containing the game's aircraft; in FSX, this is in SimObjects\Airplanes; in older versions it is just in Aircraft, without the additional SimObjects directory.

2. Double-click the folder that contains the aircraft you want to edit; for example, the Extra 300 is stored in the directory "extra300." Locate the file "aircraft.cfg"; highlight it, hit "Ctrl" and "C" on your keyboard at the same time, and then hit "Ctrl" and "V" to paste a copy of the file -- that way, if you encounter any problems you can simply restore this copy.

3. Right-click on "aircraft.cfg" and choose "Open" or "Open With." When prompted to select a program, choose WordPad. You'll see a series of sections, with the headers marked off by square brackets; for example, "[fltsim.0]" is the section that contains information about the aircraft like its name, its type, a brief description and the credits for the people who created it.

4. Make changes to the configuration file by changing only the values that follow an equals sign; never edit the information before an equals sign. For example, you could change "power_scalar=1.0" to "power_scalar=2.0" to double the power of the aircraft's engines. If you want to know what a particular line of the file does, look for the comments (the information following "//") on each line that explain what different values do.

5. Save the file and close WordPad. Start Microsoft Flight Simulator to see how the aircraft performs with the changes you've made. Remember that at any time, if you feel the aircraft has been broken, you can restore the old configuration file by deleting the current "aircraft.cfg" and renaming the copy you made.

Tips & Warnings

• If you want to add smoke to an aircraft other than Extra 300, copy the following two lines into the aircraft's CFG file (remember, to activate smoke in Flight Simulator just hit the "i" key):

• [SMOKESYSTEM]

• smoke.0=0.0, 0.0, 0.0, fx_smoke_w

References

• Microsoft: Aircraft Configuration Files