AVSIM Freeware Scenery Review

Quick! Name the busiest airports in California. Sure, you'll guess Los Angeles Int'l., San Francisco Int'l., Oakland Metro, San Diego, San Jose... Would you have guessed Orange County/John Wayne in Santa Ana? According to this scenery's creator, Shehryar Ansari, "Santa Ana is the 18th busiest airport in the world ranked according to total aircraft movements, handling 470,000 aircraft movements annually." What Shehryar has given us is an outstanding rendering of this busy airport, complete with static aircraft, lots of details, and good background information on the airport itself.

Many of you may be familiar with Shehryar's previous scenery offerings, including fabulous versions of Detroit Metro, Las Vegas McCarran Int'l., New York La Guardia, and others. This scenery is of the same high quality. A few minor glitches have been stamped out already, those being the omission of some needed textures. Downloading the scenery and the fixes will take up roughly 5.5mb, and is well worth the effort.

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Installation, Display and Documentation

The installation process for this scenery is pretty standard as far as freeware scenery goes. Keep in mind this scenery is only compatible with FS2000, but that's becoming more and more standard as time goes by. Anyway, after downloading the zipfile, you unzip it to create the usual scenery and texture subdirectories, move those to your preferred scenery location, and add the scenery to your FS2k Scenery Library. You will also need to edit your scenery.cfg to allow for flatten and exclude switches, but that is carefully explained in the readme file. I was especially impressed by the amount of useful information provided in the readme file. The documentation for this freeware scenery might just be the best I've seen from something as mundane as a readme file. You'll have to read it just to find out about the "rocketship" takeoff procedures...

There is an outstanding set of static aircraft that can be installed with this scenery, but I would recommend you think carefully before doing so. Not that there is anything wrong with them, but this scenery already makes a noticeable impact on frame rates. Adding the static aircraft makes things a little worse. Shehryar acknowledges this shortcoming in the documentation, but I feel I should at least warn you. Using this scenery with the statics doesn't make it "slide-show" slow, but it will simply feel noticeably slower. Still flyable, just slower. There, now you've been warned.

A unique feature of KSNA is the high number of general aviation aircraft movements that take place there. If you install the static aircraft, you will find plenty of GA aircraft parked around the airport. There are also some very nicely done GA hangars on both sides of the runways.

Test System P-III 733 MHz Windows 2000 SP1 384 Megs RAM GeForce DDR 6.47 Detonator Drivers 48X CD ROM SoundBlaster Live! Value CH Flight Sim Yoke CH Pedals Sony 17" Monitor Flying Time: 6 hours over 4 days Lining up for the gate General Aviation hangars Ready for pushback. Notice the engine warning arcs on the ramp Ready on RWY 19R

Part of what makes flying in and out of KSNA exciting is its proximity to other busy airports. You can really tell what a crowded airspace you're in if you are using FSTraffic or anything else that provides dynamic aircraft in the skies around you. Long Beach is just a few miles away, and LAX is 30 miles away, although it sure seems closer. There are many other medium-sized airport in the area, namely Ontario, Van Nuys, and Burbank, as well as a host of smaller fields. I have FSTraffic set to a 2-minute spacing, and at night you can see a steady stream of planes headed for LAX, after you start a climbing turn out of KSNA.

My flights to and from KSNA were mostly short hops, over from Las Vegas, up from San Diego, up to Oakland, and so on. I flew a nighttime flight down from Seattle-Tacoma, with great views of downtown LA and LAX on my descent into the area. Lest you think this is a 100% love-fest, there are some minor quibbles with this scenery, such as frame rates taking a slight dip, the textures that were missing from the original distribution of the zipfiles, and the backwards RMA/AMR sign on one of the GA hangars. [Editor's Note: Shehryar says that's the way it really is; hmm, I'll have to drive over and see...]. However, I'm sure you can understand how minor these issues really are in light of the impressive amount of work and stellar results this scenery represents.

Conclusion

It's free. Download it. What? Oh, well okay. This is a very well done freeware offering that is worth anyone's time to download, install, and explore. I love trying out new airports in areas that I fly to often, and flying somewhere other than LAX and SAN in southern California is a lot of fun. Shehryar Ansari has done another fine job, and if he's reading, I would like to make a suggestion for his next project: Lambert St. Louis Int'l. It's a surprisingly busy airport as the hub for Trans World Airlines (and soon to be a hub for American!), with ever-increasing traffic from Southwest Airlines, an interesting terminal, and a major expansion project just getting underway. Oh well, I'll climb down off my soapbox now. But if anyone out there is up to the task, I can get you maps of the W-1W expansion...