Airside
The engineering behind a controlled airfield.
Microsoft Flight Simulator supplies a world: terrain, weather, airport geometry and aircraft models. It does not supply an aeroplane that knows how to fly an approach, an airfield that knows where its taxiways lead, a day that knows when the morning bank begins, or a crew that knows what to say. Airside supplies all of that.
Airside does not hand an aircraft to the simulator and let it move on its own. It runs its own flight model for every one of them: attitude, altitude, speed, configuration, thrust, lighting and engine note are computed continuously against the wind, the pressure and the ground actually beneath the aeroplane. Nothing is animated and nothing runs on rails.
An arrival tracks the published departure (SID) and arrival (STAR) procedures, read from the simulator's own navigation data, and holds the altitudes and speeds between them at the speeds the type actually flies. The landing is derived from the physics of the aeroplane and the surface under it, so a sloping runway is landed on correctly, touchdown quality varies the way it varies in service, and the rate it touched down at is measured and reported back to you. Braking is planned toward the exit the aircraft chose. Crews go around when an approach becomes unstable or a clearance did not arrive, and a missed approach flies a real circuit.
Runways, taxiways and their names, holding points, gates and stands, and published procedures are all read from the simulator, so any airport it has works without a line of data written for it by hand, including scenery you added yourself. What Airside adds is the reasoning on top: routes that resemble the ones a real crew is given, pushbacks worked as tug movements under real turning limits, taxi speed and spacing sized to the aircraft, and an apron that settles its own conflicts before they reach you.
Separation is held in time rather than in distance alone. Runway occupancy, crossing runways and the difference between an aircraft sequencing and an aircraft somewhere it should not be are tracked continuously. Anything holding can tell you what it is holding for, and no instruction is quietly discarded: a crew that cannot comply says so on the radio.
Airside generates the day before it begins: real airlines flying out of the bases they actually operate from, in the fleets they actually operate, to destinations they actually serve, with home carriers dominating their own field the way they do in life. The apron is already working when you sit down, ground handling is a finite fleet against a queue, and gates and stands are allocated the way an apron allocates them.
Every crew has its own voice and keeps it for the whole shift, reads its clearance back, and asks for what it needs before you have to work out that it needs it. All of it is carried on a modelled VHF channel. You can speak your clearances into a microphone or issue them from the flight strip, and what you say is understood against the same phraseology the product teaches.
Every assertion in Airside has a matching mutation: the defect the test exists to catch is put back into the product and the test is required to fail. One that stays green with the bug in place is rewritten or removed, because it was proving nothing. Thresholds are audited the same way. And every shift records itself, so when something looks wrong the answer is read out of the recording rather than guessed at, and one control sends it to us.
Everything on this page is something Airside does today. What it does not do is published as well, on the known limits page, before you buy rather than after.