Meet AirBorne 1.0 beta: your next generation audio-based flight simulator for Windows and the Mac

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.

Download AirBorne 1.0 beta for macOS and Windows