The best advice I’ve been given is to spend a little money and buy AirWrench by Jerry Beckwith. You plug in the numbers, tell it which sim it’s for - CFS3 is listed - and it spits an .air and .cfg back at you. Just bear in mind you’re going to need a lot of numbers and lots of them are not in Wikipedia like aileron area, elevator angle limits up and down or fuel tank weight and position in the wings. It does a pretty good job if you can get the data.
The other (free) tools are fine for editing an existing .air file but you do have to know what you’re about. Imagine being in a NASA mission mid-flight and randomly flipping switches - wonder what this does? That’s how many other editors can seem and many models have flight behaviour which came about that way. I’m afraid there isn’t a ready how-to forum either!
