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The forums on FlightSim.com are rife with stories of people having major problems with Microsoft Flight Simulator after installing (mostly inadvertently) any application that uses Adobe Air. The application appears to “take over” any file with a .air extension – and there will likely be hundreds in your MSFS installation – rendering those files potentially useless and therefore preventing users from running MSFS.
Adobe Air is a “framework” much like Microsoft’s .Net. There are a number of applications now appearing that use Adobe Air. There’s nothing “wrong” with the framework as such, it just happens to, unfortunately, severely impact flight simmers.
Check out the full post here.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I disagree that “there’s nothing wrong with the framework as such.”
There’s a LOT wrong with it … since Adobe’s framework hoses my other software. That’s wrong, and could have been prevented if Adobe worked well in the community of software developers and properly beta tested its software.
The .air extension has been reserved. The morons at Adobe should research file extensions before basing their entire marketing efforts around a file extension.
This will likely cost them millions of dollars.
Thanks for the comment.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by the extension being “reserved”. Anyone is able to use any extension they wish. A quick look at this site reveals a few others that use it, and that was just by doing a quick Google.
As much as I’d like to believe otherwise, we flight simulators are a tiny minority of PC users. It’s therefore not impossible that this problem never came up in beta testing. And, let’s face it, there’s no developer of any size that can test their application against every single other application – they’d never get it released.
Also, how could this cost them millions of dollars? Why would it cost them anything at all?
It’s not good, I’d agree – hence my pointing it out in the first place, but with a little care, we should be able to avoid any problems.
Apologies for the trouble. We tried to pick an extension that was not widely used, but as noted, it’s virtaally impossible to choose one that isn’t used at all. (And no, this issue did not come up during beta testing.)
In any case, file type associations are ultimately in the user’s control. Under Folder Options > File Types, you can re-associate .air with Flight Simulator. Also, for any given .air file, you should be able to select between relevant applications by right-clicking and selecting Open With.
Hope that helps,
Oliver Goldman | Adobe AIR Engineering
Hi Oliver. Thanks for taking the time to comment.
One of the comments on the forum linked to above mentions that Adobe Air caused corruption to the posters .air files. Does Adobe Air modify the files in any way?
When the .air files are called within Flight Simulator, the operating system is calling the associated application, Adobe Air, which then fails to correctly open the file and throw an error because the file is a FS file not an AA file. This can be rectified by reassociating .air extensions to FS in the control panel but I do feel that Adobe should accept some responsibility for this. Their support website doesn’t mention anything about this issue and although Oliver is doing the rounds informing people, surely a note on the Adobe support site would be more appropriate.
Fair point re Adobe letting people know, Ed.