Brief History and General Information on Noble Air

Welcome to Noble Air. Noble Air was conceived in June 1994 by Tim Virkler with its first operational hub in San Francisco. Since that time, Noble Air has grown considerably and now represents the largest and most diverse pilot base of simulated airlines currently in operation online. Noble Air now provides services to cities around the world via an extensive number of hubs on both the Internet and CompuServe.

Noble Air's goal is to bring like minded flight simulator pilots together and give them new and different goals to achieve using their flight simulator program. Pilots will be able to achieve higher pilot ranks and more hours by flying routes assigned by their Hub Captains.

Hopefully, throughout the course of their career, pilots will face new challenges and achieve a new level of enjoyment from their flight simulator. The Flight Simulation forum has hundreds of like minded pilots, from occasional simulator pilots to professional pilots, who share the same interest and love of aviation. It is our goal to introduce the new simulated airline pilot to this forum of enthusiasts and improve their enjoyment of flight simulation and aviation in general.

Noble Air started in San Francisco using one gate that it shared with American Airlines. The fleet consisted of one Learjet 35A aircraft and serviced nearby cities. Noble's operation philosophy was simple: offer the business traveler a no frills, on time, and courteous means to get to and from their destination. By using the Learjet, Noble could fly into airports too small to be serviced by larger jets and could get them there faster than other carriers that were using turboprop aircraft for the same cities. After one week in service, Noble found it could not keep up with demand and began hiring new pilots and leasing new Learjets. Today, the Noble Air fleet consists of a variety of aircraft and a constantly growing pilot base to operate those new aircraft.

At first, Noble Air's paint scheme consisted of simply blue striping along the sides of the aircraft (the colors that were on the plane when it was leased). With the purchase of additional aircraft, Noble introduced its own paint scheme of red and blue which proved immediately popular and may still be seen on some of our aircraft. In 1996 new colors were designed for the Noble fleet. On June 1st, 2001 a new scheme was introduced. New aircraft are being rolled out in this attractive scheme and this will gradually replace all aircraft painted in the older colors. The fin and rudder of Noble aircraft bear the distinctive symbol resembling the Scottish Lion.