Is the air flow meter necessary?

[CMPLX01]

So ive herd somewhere that the airflow meter can be taken out. but doing so would mess with the computer..  how do i throw it out with affecting performance?

[MLM]

On a stock ECU you need the AFM, There has been no sucessful conversions to non afm on the stock ecu to my knowlege using MAF and chips etc though there are some working on this.

To throw out the AFM 'just' throw in an aftermarket ecu and retune from scratch.

[bmwman91]

You cannot remove any stock sensor and expect the thing to run properly. The AFM does not hurt performance on an internally stock engine either, so there is absolutely NO reason to want to remove it. Period.