Howto:Install aircraft
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The preferred option to install the latest official aircraft is through the Aircraft tab in the built-in launcher, as explained in the following video. The remainder of this article describes the manual process, only to be performed when you don't use the aircrafts from the official FGAddon hangar.
Manual installation process
Aircraft packages are available on FlightGear.org Aircraft. These require unzipping software to extract from a compressed file format. Then these must be manually installed in a FlightGear software installation to use. The details depend on the method of download, operating system, and user setup.
Alternatively if you are using the nightly builds or a version controlled copy of FlightGear, or you wish to manage your aircraft collection using version control tools, the aircraft can be obtained directly from the official FlightGear aircraft repository - FGAddon.
Linux
(Ubuntu 12.04)
- Download the aircraft
- Create a directory to store your aircraft if you have not already done so. Make sure this directory is outside /usr/share/games/flightgear/. For example, use /home/{YourUserName}/FlightGear/CustomAircraft.
- Extract your aircraft file into the folder (the one you created above)
- unzip XXXXX.zip
- Start up FlightGear with Launcher. In Launcher, go to the Add-ons tab. In the Additional aircraft folders section, click the Add button and select the main folder for additional aircrafts (in our case /home/{YourUserName}/FlightGear/CustomAircraft). Now your plane should appear on the list of planes, otherwise restart FlightGear.
Now, you just need to unzip the next downloaded aircraft in the same directory and it should already be visible on FlightGear.
Macintosh OS X
- Download the aircraft
- Create a directory to store your aircraft if you have not already done so. Make sure this directory is somewhere you can find easily, For example, use
/Users/{YourUserName}/Aircraft. - Extract your aircraft file into the folder (the one you created above)
- Start up FlightGear with Launcher. In Launcher, go to the Add-ons tab. In the Additional aircraft folders section, click the Add button and select the main folder for additional aircrafts (in our case
/Users/{YourUserName}/Aircraft). Now your plane should appear on the list of planes, otherwise restart FlightGear.
Now, you just need to unzip the next downloaded aircraft in the same directory and it should already be visible on FlightGear. This method is preferred over modifying FGData as it allows you to more easily access the aircrafts files, as well as having the benefit of persisting across FG updates, saving the hassle of having to redownload and install your aircraft each time you update FlightGear.
Windows
- Download an aircraft and save it on your desktop.
- Unzip the file using a file archiver, for example the open source file archiver 7-Zip.
- Create a directory to store your aircraft if you have not already done so. Make sure this directory is outside your $FG_ROOT directory. For example, use C:\Users\{YourUserName}\FlightGear\CustomAircraft.
- Move the unzipped folder (usually the aircraft's name) to your that aircraft directory.
- Start up FlightGear with Launcher. In Launcher, go to the Add-ons tab. In the Additional aircraft folders section, click the Add button and select the main folder for additional aircrafts (in our case C:\Users\{YourUserName}\FlightGear\CustomAircraft). Now your plane should appear on the list of planes, otherwise restart FlightGear.
Now, you just need to unzip the next downloaded aircraft in the same directory and it should already be visible on FlightGear.
From the command line
Launching FlightGear from the command line, use the --fg-aircraft=path option, which in our case can be: --fg-aircraft=/home/{YourUserName}/FlightGear/CustomAircraft.
When installing an aircraft fails
Rename aircraft folder
If FlightGear fails to start with the new aircraft you have installed, or if it starts but the aircraft is invisible you might have to rename the folder where the aircraft files are. This issue is most often encountered when downloading a .zip file from some online git repository. In those cases you will most likely end up with a folder name of the following form MyZippedRepo-[branch]. In this case you should rename the folder to be just MyZippedRepo.
If the above doesn't work, or for other cases, check for a readme file and have a look there for instructions.
Otherwise open the aircraft-set.xml file and search in it for paths containing Aircraft/AircraftFolderName. The name of the folder should match AircraftFolderName.
For instance if in the imaginary-set.xml you would find an instance like this:
<splash-texture>Aircraft/MyCreation/splash1.png</splash-texture>
that means that you should rename the folder where imaginary-set.xml is to MyCreation.
XML files with wrong encoding
If you start FlightGear with the new plane you installed and there is no cockpit or exterior, this may be because the XML files are in the wrong encoding.
To fix this on Linux try this:
$ cd path/to/aircraft/directory/
$ find . -name "*.xml" -print | xargs sed -i 's/<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>/<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>/g'
If any of the methods above do not work, ask around on the multiplayer chat, IRC or on the forum 
.
Choosing aircraft
If you are looking for information to decide what aircraft to download, try:
External links to third party aircraft can be found at FlightGear hangars. Remember that the latest aircraft may not load with previous versions. If you happen to use an older version of FlightGear, look for older aircraft in the links section.