I discovered the joys of AI a few months back when I installed 9 Dragons and followed the advice of Peter and stocked up with the fantastic WoAI packages. I really enjoy seeing and flying amongst the modern stuff at an international airport as it gives a whole new dimension to flight sim.
As already mentioned, we'd all like to see a lot more classic AI but it does raise the problem of anachronism (
• noun 1. a thing belonging to a period other than the one in which it exists. 2. the placing of something in the wrong historical period. ;-) ). Also there isn't anything of the quality of WoAI.
My solution is to choose an airport as a classic base (in my case Kai Tak as it is
already an anachronism in FS) and base any decent classic AI that I can find there. Then just write some basic flightplans so that they can do simple round trips to reasonably close destinations. For example Hong Kong - Taipei or Manila and back. Once you've written a simple one-line flightplan you can copy it as many times as you like, adding (for instance) an hour to the departure and arrival timings on each line. Then you have an hourly arrival/departure for that particular aircraft without really caring where it goes to in between. Although the traffic is flying to it's destination it's not your concern as you are only interested in it's arrival and departure at your base. So you might want to give it a long turnround time there and a short one at it's destination. You might want to also choose a quiet destination that you are unlikely to visit so it stays out of mind!
The real problem is the lack of classic AI of the quality of WoAI, but a good start is DM's VC10. DM has already converted this to AI and it is available on his website - you can add the existing paints to give a variety. I fly a few AI variations of the VC10 including the C1K and to boost the military flavour I use the quite nice RAF Boeing AWACS and C130s from UKMil. Other classics of decent quality are on the AI Aardvark site. They've got some fairly decent 741s, 742s, 727s and DC9s.
http://www.ai-aardvark.com/ scroll to the bottom for a link to the aircraft.
I don't know if Peter would consider making his classic conversions available. I know he has done the Trident and a BOAC 707 freighter but I can't remember what else. I'm too shy to ask him. Perhaps you would ask, Ben?
Cheers
Ian
