I was referring to the command line tools for building an AIR app for iOS on Windows. no VM required to run them, as far as I know. they should be native Windows executables. however, iOS AIR apps do indeed contain native code. the AS3 bytecode from the .swf file is AOT compiled to native code using LLVM. they did it this way because Apple doesn't let iOS apps use JIT, and simply interpreting bytecode is too slow. so there needed to be a way to generate native code to get decent performance. it's actually pretty cool