AirBorne is a flight simulator you fly entirely by ear and by keyboard. It is free, it runs on macOS and Windows, and the 1.0 beta is available today.
It was not built by taking a simulator and bolting speech onto it. There was never a screen to adapt: everything the aeroplane knows, it says, and everything a sighted pilot reads at a glance is one keystroke away here. That decision shows up in small places — the instruments live on the number row and answer whatever else is going on, so asking your airspeed is never something you have to leave a menu to do.
The engines are computed, not recorded
This is the part I would ask you to listen to first, and it is most of why the simulator sounds different from what you may expect.
The engines are not loops of recorded audio faded in and out. They are synthesised in real time from what the engine is doing: the core spinning up from a standstill on the starter, fuel lighting at a fifth of N2, the fan beginning to follow the core rather than moving with it. A jet spooling up is heard as a rising whine followed by a rising roar, because that is two shafts doing two different things, and a recording cannot do that.
You can also move around the aircraft and listen from somewhere else. From the flight deck an A320 is surprisingly quiet — the engines are behind you, under the wing, and the bulkhead eats most of it. Go and stand on the wing while you start one, and you will hear what a start actually sounds like.
The aeroplane is the real one
The A320's overhead panel is described switch by switch, with the names painted on the real thing: ADIRS, ELEC, APU, AIR, ANTI ICE, HYD, FUEL, EXT LT. Two batteries, not one. Three inertial reference units with their own OFF, NAV and ATT selectors. Six fuel pumps and a crossfeed. Starting an engine is the two-stage procedure it is on the aircraft — the mode selector, then the master — and at NORM nothing turns and the aeroplane tells you why.
The normal checklists are there, and they refuse. Called for an item the aircraft is not configured for, the list will not move on, and it says what is wrong rather than repeating the challenge: told the flaps are up when they should be at one, you know what to reach for.
None of this is decoration. The order these systems impose is the reason a cockpit preparation is done in the sequence it is done in, and it is what you take with you if you ever sit in a real one.
The radio, and voices that are people
Air traffic control is here from the clearance on the stand to the taxi in at the far end: the delivery, the pushback, the taxi instructions, the departure, the handoffs across a country, the descent, the approach, and the ground controller who gives you a stand at the other end. You can answer with the keyboard, or install speech recognition and answer out loud.
By default the controllers speak with your own synthesiser, and that works. But a frequency where every controller sounds like the same voice you use to read your email is a frequency you never quite believe, and this is the one part of the simulator that has to be heard rather than described.
So there is an AI-voiced radio, where controllers sound like people — different people, with the clip and the cadence of somebody reading a clearance to an aircraft rather than reciting a sentence. It changes the thing more than any feature I could list here, and it is why every account created during the beta comes with fourteen days of it. It runs the moment you sign up, the account menu shows the days remaining, and at the end of them the voices simply go back to your synthesiser. Nothing to cancel.
Afterwards it is an optional subscription, because those voices are rendered on servers that cost money every month. It is the only thing in AirBorne that is ever paid for, and it affects only the controllers' voices — the exchanges, the phraseology, and speaking into a microphone all work without it.
Free, and what that means
The simulator is free. There is no crippled version, no demo, and no feature held back for people who pay. The aircraft, the systems, the world, the radio and the logbook are what you get by downloading it.
Settings, and who speaks with which voice
The settings are worth ten minutes on your first evening, because most of what makes the simulator comfortable is decided there.
A voice for each station. The aeroplane does not have one voice, it has a cast, and you choose each one separately: air traffic control, the cabin crew, the aircraft's own callouts, the instruments you interrogate, the menus and the warnings. Each gets its own voice, its own language, its own rate and its own level. Giving the controller a different voice from the one reading your instruments is the difference between a stream of speech and a conversation you can follow.
This is also where the AI radio is switched on. Once your fourteen days are running, the controllers keep speaking with your system synthesiser until you go and choose an online voice for the radio — the trial does not change anything by itself. It is one setting, and it is the one to find first if you want to hear what the fuss is about.
Also there: units, in feet and knots or metres and kilometres; sound levels for each family of sound separately, set while the thing you are balancing is making a noise; the language the game speaks; and your account, where the logbook syncs and the subscription is shown.
What else is in it
- The Airbus A320 family and the A350 — nine airframes with their variants.
- Ground movement on real aerodrome layouts, with a continuous audio cue for the centreline and spoken calls for what is coming. If you would rather not taxi, the aircraft will follow the clearance itself, on departure and on arrival, and hands control back the moment you take it.
- Real navigation: departure and arrival procedures, ILS approaches, and a worldwide aerodrome database.
- A cabin crew who exist: they call you, you answer them, and they report the cabin secure when it is.
- The turnaround — fuel, passengers, doors, pushback.
- A logbook that keeps every flight and follows your account from one machine to another.
- English and French throughout.
Add-ons, all free
The game is complete as it installs. Alongside it, an Add-ons menu offers optional downloads, fetched from inside the game rather than hunted for on the web:
- Recorded voices, in English and French, for any of the stations above.
- Speech recognition, about 1.6 GB, which hears what you say, and understanding, about 2.5 GB, which works out what you asked for. Both run on your own machine, send nothing anywhere, and cost nothing. On Windows there is a third download that puts them on the graphics card; on a Mac that is already the case.
None of it is required. The radio works perfectly well from the keyboard.
On the Mac
The app is signed and notarised, so Gatekeeper lets it through without the usual argument, and there is nothing else to install — no separate simulator, no data pack to find. Download, install, fly.
It is a beta, and it is playable
Beta here does not mean a demo or a preview. You can start cold and dark at a stand, call for your clearance, run the checklists, start both engines, taxi out, fly a departure, cross a country, fly an ILS down to a runway and taxi to a gate at the other end — today, in one sitting. That is the whole flight, and it works.
What beta means is that it has not yet been put through its paces by many people. Things will break, and some will feel odd or unfinished. That is exactly what I would rather find out now than in six months.
Telling me what you find
Please use this thread for anything you run into. I will read all of it and answer here. An English-language mailing list is being set up for AirBorne and I will post the address in this thread as soon as it exists; until then, this is the place.
What helps most, in order: the moment you did not know what to do next; a key that said nothing; something that sounds wrong against the real world if you know aviation; and crashes, with what you were doing at the time.
Go and fly something
If you take one thing from this post, make it the first start. Battery on, the APU spinning up behind you, its bleed opened, and then the first engine turning over on air you had to think about supplying — and if you want to hear it properly, walk back and stand on the wing while it lights.
It costs nothing and it takes about ten minutes.
Comments
Thanks Claude
I have no problem if people use AI to develop things, I do myself and I'm impressed every day. But please at least take the time and write the marketing blah yourself. I wanna hear what you made, not Claude.
Judge the product, not what it was written by AI
Does it matter that oh it was written by AI? Specifically, the marketing? To me? Hell no. if you’re gonna judge this, if you already judge it out of the gate by oh the marketing was written with AI? you pretty much already failed at the door. It would be best to test the product, who cares if it was written by AI or not. Further more, you do realize technically speaking, this could have been written by a person, and then just restructured/reformatted with AI hypothetically speaking so, but again, judge the product. sí, here’s the thing. So what he marketing was written with AI? There is no difference in, Let’s say the developer having a group of team members and let’s say somebody from the marketing Department writes the description of this but, its, not the dev himself who wrote it. Practically same story.
I for one? Will give feedback on the product itself as that's what matters. Whether the marketing was written with AI or by another person, who is not a developer? That is of no consequence.
Some Real Feedback
Paid Voices
Is speech generated entirely on a server? What are the optional voice downloads supposed to do then? I can preview these voices elsewhere and I know what they sound like, but the game should have a preview ffeature that lets the user hear a sample. And you can definitely download an ordinary app found on the App Store to generate as much free audio as you want using these OpenAI voices, so there's no point in charging us for those. You can also use Google Gemini's free voices or other alternatives like Kokoro TTS, Piper, Supertonic-3, MOSS-TTS, Dots.TTS, Qwen3-TTS, or any of the other available models. FYI, Kokoro TTS has the same set of voices that OpenAI offers, so you should offer those as a free option. I'm saying that because these options won't cost you anything. So I don't mean to accuse you of anything but you have a plethora of free alternatives to pick from instead of paying for the voices and then asking us to cover the cost.
Mac Version
The Mac version is not launching for me. I downloaded and redownloaded the application but it is not starting. No crashing report no errors, no messages in the Privacy and Security settings.
some more feedback
First, it’s a little difficult to figure out how everything works without a readme—or, at least, I didn’t find one when looking through the program’s main folder.
Second, the confirmation sound that plays after pressing Enter on a menu option seems slightly delayed. For example, if you enter Settings, you hear the voice announce “Settings” first, followed roughly half a second later by the confirmation sound. It’s more of a thunk than a click, really.
I also noticed that this confirmation sound seems identical, at least to my ear, to the “brakes off” sound used in Eurofly 3.
For reference, I’ve included both sounds side by side. The comparison begins with the “brakes off” sound from Eurofly 3. You’ll then hear Airborne say “Nothing to do here,” followed by its menu sound. That sequence repeats several times over approximately 14 seconds.
Could anyone confirm whether these are indeed the same sound?
To be completely clear, I am not accusing the developer of copying anything or doing anything improper. This particular sound comes from a commercial royalty-free sound library, so there is an entirely legitimate explanation: the developer may simply have licensed the same sound independently. If that is the case, there is no issue whatsoever.
I’m only asking because the two sounds appear identical when compared directly, and I would be interested in knowing whether Airborne’s copy came independently from the original library. Given some previous experiences I’ve had with unauthorized reuse of audio assets, I would rather ask than make assumptions or jump to conclusions.
https://e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ83y77ZYLq0ceC6ktfBgFXsXavGw8ymzp6V
Yes.
I also concluded it's the same sound. And yes, a readme or some sort of in-game tutorial would be greatly appreciated. By the way, the game installs into %appdata% instead of C:\Program Files (x86). And the game does use samples and I found them and listened to them, so the claim in the description that the engines are computed and synthesized in real-time rather than "loops of recorded audio faded in and out" appears to be inaccurate and misleading. Using MP3 files as loops is also quite unprofessional; use FLAC or WAV instead. I wouldn't use MP3 at all; it's an outdated lossy format. But if you do, don't do it for the loops at least, because MP3 files don't really loop seamlessly; you hear a tiny gap at the beginning.
first answers to some feedbacks
Dear all,
Thanks so much for reporting all the feedbacks so far and asking questions, that's precisely why I put it as a "beta" , and it really helps me make it better.
Some answers to the feedbacks I read here:
Again, thanks a lot for your feedbacks and questions, and please dont hesitate to post here for further questions or remarks.
Yeah, I can't fly an airplane without prior guidance.
Uh, look, I'm no pilot, and I don't know how to operate this thing, and you wouldn't want to make me liable for a plane crash, assuming I could even survive it.
thanks for the clarification
@kaillewaille, thank you for your response. I would ask that you remove all audio assets taken from Eurofly 3.
For future reference, if you do not have a license to use a sound, please do not use it. Recording something yourself or purchasing your own license is completely different from extracting an asset from another game. I purchased the license that allowed me to use that sound in Eurofly 3; that license does not transfer to somebody who obtains the sound from the game or anyone else; the license is individual.
If possible, could you clarify which Eurofly 3 sounds were used and provide a complete list? That would allow me to keep track of them and confirm that they have all been removed.
I’m glad this will be resolved in the next update. With that being said, if you would like help finding legitimate sources for good aircraft sounds, I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.
For general sound effects, some relatively affordable options are Soundsnap and Audioblocks. Both provide access to large sound libraries through paid subscriptions. You would need to check their current plans and licensing terms, as prices and download limits can change.
For dedicated aircraft recordings, Pole Position Production has good turboprop and piston-aircraft material. Airborne Sound also has some useful aircraft libraries, although its files are often delivered as complete stereo recordings rather than isolated components, and a library may not always include every stage you need, such as engine startup and shutdown.
For jet engines specifically, BOOM Library’s Turbine plugin is worth considering because it is designed for synthesizing and designing jet-engine sounds.
Another option for vehicle recordings is Krotos Audio, specifically the sound libraries made for its Igniter plugin. These libraries mostly focus on ground vehicles, so their usefulness for this project may be limited, but they also contain recordings of a few helicopters, jets, and other aircraft. I don’t know what the individual libraries currently cost or whether every library can be purchased separately, so you would need to check. The complete Igniter package is expensive—it has previously cost around $1,000—but I purchased it during a sale at approximately 70 percent off. It may therefore be worth watching for discounts.
If you need more hands-on sound-design help, feel free to contact me. My schedule is currently quite full, so it would depend on the amount of work and my availability. Any substantial work would also need to be a paid arrangement, but the offer is there.
Also, if you could, please let me know when the sounds are removed? I would appreciate it.
Also, one final note? If you need help with rolling sounds, take a look at the plug-in, grip by boom. it’s specifically for chassy, suspension impacts, rolling sounds, etc.
the voices
hi so i love the music at the start by the way but the voices that you can download are they the Ai ones? the 28 english voices i mean?
if so when you ask it to "read a line" nothing happens.
And yes, confused how to get started although when i pressed s it mentioned the wing flaps and i could move with the arrow keys and "clear to takeoff was anounced but when i set a flight plan, the plane already taxying it seemed to the runway.
AI Use in Posts on AppleVis
Hi all,
Because there has been some dialog about the use of AI in posts, I wanted to take a moment to share our current position and thinking on the matter as site administrators and moderators.
The bulk of our current policy on AI use was written in November 2023, when ChatGPT and similar tools were still very new. It was subsequently updated to add a specific disclosure requirement, in an effort to help people know if they are reading something AI-generated. A lot has happened since that policy was last revised, and I fully expect that we will update the policy soon to reflect how people are actually using the technology.
For now, because it has come up in multiple threads, I want to state unequivocally that AppleVis fully supports the use of AI for language translation and as an assistive tool for a person with a disability. If AI helps you access and participate in our community, please know that we support you 100%.
Thanks,
Michael Hansen
Director | AppleVis
revising my previous post, This is way worse than stated
@kaillewaille, after inspecting Airborne’s sound folders and comparing them directly against Eurofly 3, I need to revise my previous response.
The extent of the material taken from Eurofly 3 is far greater than your statement that “some” sounds were used suggested. This is not a matter of one or two temporary placeholder sounds being packaged accidentally. The packaged aircraft audio collection was copied from Eurofly 3 on a broad scale while retaining the same filenames, naming conventions and organizational structure.
Inside Airborne’s main Airbus folder, the files follow Eurofly 3’s structure and use the exact same names I gave them: APU on, loop and off; battery on, loop and off; brakes on and off; flaps on and off; clicks one through five; landing gear up and down; seatbelt on and off; and doors opening and closing.
The individual engine folders for the nine aircraft currently included in Airborne also reproduce Eurofly 3’s start, idle and shutdown structure using the same filenames. I compared Airborne’s audio directly against the corresponding Eurofly 3 files. They are the same sounds, with the same durations and the same seamless loops I created. The APU sounds have also been compared and confirmed as direct matches. This extends beyond the aircraft engines to the shared aircraft-family sounds and menu clicks.
I no longer need a list of the affected assets because I have now identified the scope myself. The Airbus family folder contains 26 files, and all 26 were copied from Eurofly 3. Airborne currently contains nine Airbus aircraft folders, each with three engine files—start, idle and shutdown—and all 27 of those files were also copied from their corresponding Eurofly 3 folders. Including the menu sound that led to my original post, that is at least 54 assets taken directly from Eurofly 3.
Given that this is currently a beta with a limited collection of assets, this represents practically the entire packaged aircraft sound set. All of those sounds will need to be replaced.
Some of these assets contain audio I personally recorded or designed, while others come from commercial libraries licensed for use in Eurofly 3. Neither category may be extracted from Eurofly 3 and redistributed in another project.
Your explanation that these sounds were included for testing and packaged unintentionally may explain how they reached the public beta, but it does not explain or justify copying complete collections of audio assets from Eurofly 3 into Airborne in the first place.
Given the verified extent of what was copied, waiting until the next routine beta update is not sufficient. I am asking that the currently distributed build be withdrawn or replaced immediately. Every sound originating from Eurofly 3—including any renamed, converted, edited or otherwise modified copy—must be removed from the entire project.
This means that the affected aircraft engines, shared aircraft-family sounds and interface sounds will all need legitimate replacements. Those replacements may be recorded or designed originally, synthesized, or obtained from properly licensed sources, but they cannot be taken from Eurofly 3.
Please confirm publicly when the affected build has been withdrawn or replaced and all Eurofly 3 material has been removed.
In my previous response, before I understood the full extent of this, I offered resources and possible professional assistance. The legitimate resources I listed remain available for you to investigate independently. However, having now confirmed the scale of the copying, I am withdrawing my offer of personal assistance.
Regarding sounds and Eurofly 3
Hi,
Just to write it here so there would be absolutely no confusion: any sound present in the 1.0.0 beta release coming from Eurofly were there by accident, and will be removed from the next beta release which is being polished before publishing.
As yit has been mentionned, a bare copy of all E3's assets were present within the game which was never never intended at the beginning.
1.0.1b1 is out
Hello everyone,
Before anything else, I owe you all an explanation and an apology.
As some of you noticed, this post was temporarily unpublished. The reason is simple, and the report that led to it was accurate: earlier beta builds of AirBorne contained sound assets originating from Eurofly 3 — including sounds created by its sound designer and sounds licensed commercially for that game. Those sounds should never have shipped in AirBorne, whatever the circumstances. I take full responsibility for that, and I apologize to the Eurofly team, to the sound designer whose work was involved, and to this community.
Here is what has been done since:
- The download was disabled immediately, on AppleVis and on the AirBorne website, until the issue was fully resolved.
- Version 1.0.1-beta1, available now, contains none of those sounds. Every sound that came out of somebody else's folders has left the game.
- I have reviewed and reworked the release process itself, so that reference or third-party material present on my development machine can never end up in a shipped build again.
I also want to thank the AppleVis team for handling this quickly and fairly, and the person who reported it: they were right to do so, and the project is better for it.
I'll post a message later to detail what changed in 1.0.1 beta1, but I prefer to address this sound issue first, as it is far more important than a changelog.
Thanks again to the Applevis Editorial team, the reporter, and everyone for your understanding and patience.