FSX Air Transat Airbus A310-300

Air Transat Airbus A310-300. The Thomas Ruth A310-300 in Air Transat colors. Thomas Ruth's base pack TOMA310.ZIP is required. Air Transat is the largest passenger operator of the A310 with 13 aircraft. By Ryan Gabuyo.

Thank you for downloading my third repaint release, this time it is the Thomas Ruth A310-300 painted in Air Transat colors, aircraft registration C-GTSF.
-I have a couple Thomas Ruth A340-300 repaints that have been finished for weeks although being Finnair and Air France (old) colors. At this time I may not release the Finnair A343 as I have not been given the copyrights from the original painter (the person who painted the Finnair A330-300 and A340-300 in OneWorld colors), but you just might be able to expect it in the future. The Air France paint was adapted from the included Air France A330-200 paint, originally by Thomas Ruth.

-These textures are formatted in a special DXT5 format, if you have trouble opening these textures, I recommend downloading the DXTBMP DDS Texture manipulator.

YOU MUST HAVE THOMAS RUTH's A310 PACKAGE INSTALLED ON YOUR SYSTEM TO USE THESE TEXTURES.

Background info:

Air Transat is one of nine commerical carriers in the world to operate a fleet consisting of only wide-bodied jets, they are a charter airline that takes passengers to vacation spots, for example to the south to Florida during summer and east to European countries during winter.

Upon the release of Thomas Ruth's A310, I was excited with another high-quality freeware Airbus heavy airliner to add to my collection of his other Airbus heavies as well as the (fsx-upgraded) Airbus A320 series by Project Airbus. Since Air Transat is the largest passenger operator of this jet, with 13 operating (to be replaced by A330s to have an all-A330 fleet), I just had to go paint it out, as it was not included in the original A310 package.

I also noticed upon completion of my first draft that some textures looked missing, I had to extract some from the main "texture.white" folder and rename them to be read (for example the sim tried to read "main_bump.dds" for my repaint but in the texture.white folder the file was named "main_bump_ge.dds")

This repaint wouldn't have been possible without the included blank textures included in the A310 package, and as I am somewhat experienced in repainting the Thomas Ruth Airbuses, it was easy to leap right into. After a few bits of trial and error with alignment (a long fuselage kit I did not find) I got the initial fuselage paint right, including a registration and landing gear door number.

It took a few pictures from airliners.net to realize that the tail was not supposed to be mirrored on the other side, nor did I align the livery correctly on one of the sides. I learned that the alignment of the "air transat" text near the front of the plane varies from aircraft to aircraft, so I advise in the future when using pictures from different angles, make sure they are all the same plane (so in turn I had to look up the registration C-GTSF for the specific plane on airliners.net).

It also took me a while to find where the winglet paint was supposed to go, I had extensively searched the wing and main fuselage textures, but then I found it was part of the "glass" texture, and with a few trials and errors I got these to work fine.

Upon testing of this aircraft on a flight from Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport I noticed there was a glitch in AI traffic flow causing bottlenecks, so I had actually downloaded an AFACD file from Flightsim just for this flight called "cyul_ka-1.zip". The aircraft had operated as expected, although from past tests I knew it was a tad overpowered, and my plane was relatively light on weight, so I didn't use full power on takeoff.

After around four hours of flying we safely and smoothly landed in Fort Lauderdale, this jet is remarkably easy to fly especially for beginners, although from experience, Thomas Ruth's A330 (and A330s generally in real-life) gives the smoothest landings. Once we parked at the gate and moved the jetway I noticed the contact point's height was not set correctly, and should be moved up a few feet.

Installation:

1. Unzip this file to any directory, or for those who can open ZIP files like any other folder, open this ZIP file and copy the "texture.airtransat" folder into your "Tom_A310-300" folder in your FSX/Simobjects/Airplanes directory.

2. Copy the following information into your "aircraft.cfg" file, replacing the X with the next available number (for example if the last entry was "[fltsim.3]" you would change the x to "[fltsim.4]"

[fltsim.x]
title=Air Transat A310
sim=TomA310
model=GE
panel=310GE
sound=GE
texture=airtransat
kb_checklists=
kb_reference=
atc_parking_types=GATE
atc_parking_codes=TSC
atc_id=C-GTSF
atc_airline=Air Transat
atc_flight_number=961
atc_heavy=1
ui_manufacturer=Airbus
ui_typerole=Commercial Airliner
ui_createdby=Thomas Ruth
ui_type=A310-300
ui_variation=Air Transat

3. That's all you need to do, enjoy flying the stubbiest of the Airbus heavies!

Trivia: Air Transat 961 was a flight from Cuba to Quebec City, mid-flight, the rudder had separated due to a stress fracture, and the plane landed safely back at Varadero airport. The aircraft had previously flown for Emirates, the registration was "C-GPAT" and still flies with Air Transat today. This incident provided insight on rudder problems and Air Transat had again looked over its maintenance procedures, as the rudder was faulty for several days before the accident. Air Transat had previously had an incident on maintenance issues and incorrect parts after Flight 236 had had a fuel leak in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, before landing safely on the Azores islands of Portugal. The incident became related to an American Airlines incident some four years earlier with an A300 with rudder sensitivity problems.