Introduction In the 1920's and 1930's, Londoners going on a day trip to Brighton on the South Coast of England would travel on one of the new electric trains, the “Brighton Belle” being the most famous of these. After its descent from the chalk hills of the North Downs, and just before the climb up and over the South Downs, the train would rattle at speed past a station known as “Gatwick Racecourse”. On race days and public holidays, the train would stop at this station, its prime purpose being to bring spectators to the oval-shaped steeplechase racecourse with its 29 jumps. Fast forward seventy years. A small nearby airfield has long since bought this neighbouring racecourse, and through decades of continuous growth has become London's second largest airport, with 32 million passengers in 2000. The oval course of the race track is now covered by the North Terminal, the South Terminal, and the monorail that joins the two. The railway station is still there, much enlarged and modernized, and provides an important link for passengers coming from London. There are two runways, although they are too close together for dual operation, so the northerly one is only for backup. And now this airport has been modelled in GMAX, for FS2002 and FS2004, by Online Simulation Solutions. Based in Kansas City, Missouri, OSS have already published the London Docklands airport “London City 2003”, and are currently working on “Kansas City 2004”.
Installation & Documentation Installation is by download only, from the OSS website. It's a large download, 73 Mb, which will be daunting for those on a dial-up link. The Download page says that a three-part option will be “available soon”, but I understand from the publishers that technical issues are currently preventing this from happening. Once the download is complete, the user is presented with a Flight1 Purchasing wrapper, which is then executed. This asks for the usual credit card details, and once these are approved, a key file is supplied, which allows the rest of the installation to proceed. There is a choice of installation to FS2002 or FS2004. I chose the latter, and it is FS2004 version that I will be reviewing.
I found the installation process to be somewhat flawed. I was asked to select a folder for installation; however this wasn't the folder for the scenery itself, but a folder for three intermediate files that then served no further purpose, and so could have been deleted. The scenery itself was installed into the FS9 main folder, not into “Scenery” or “Addon scenery” which would be more usual and make it easier to manage. I was asked where I wanted my shortcuts to be located, but the installer ignored my response and set up its own folder regardless. It also created a 70Mb folder containing a number of AI aircraft, but these are not used anywhere, and none of the documentation tells you what to do with them. When I first visited the scenery, aircraft were parked with noses inside terminal buildings; an email to Technical Support rapidly located an AFCAD file to fix this, the URL being embedded in a message in one of their support forums. Finally, when I tested the Uninstall procedure, I was presented with a message that asked me to “Remove the entry from the scenery.cfg file”! Life with a PC, not to mention life with a flight simulator, is complicated enough without having to jump through these hoops. Publishers of commercial products should not assume that their customers would recognise an AFCAD, or a scenery.cfg file, even if it jumped out and bit them. The average flightsim user wants a package that will install correctly, and automatically, the very first time. If I am a scenery publisher, and my scenery will only work correctly with a new AFCAD, then I should bundle that AFCAD into the basic package; I should not expect the customer to go searching the support forums. The package comes with an Adobe User Guide, which was comprehensive, although one or two items require bringing up-to-date. The FAQ states that Gatwick 2004 is compatible with the popular Visual Flight VFR Scenery; however, not being a user of this, I couldn't check this myself. A separate download is needed for a bundle of charts for the airport, including one showing the taxiways – this is vital, as we will see shortly. The Airport Once I had finally installed the package in its complete form, the experience improved substantially. As Dorothy says in “The Wizard of Oz”, the team from OSS have come “a long way from Kansas”, in order to model this airport in the south of England. However it is clear that they have done their research very thoroughly, and have obviously used sources well beyond the published airport charts and standard publicity material. “Did you know”, I asked my wife, showing that in spite of being a flight simulator recluse, I have not lost the art of conversation, “that there is a sewage plant just to the north of Gatwick's North terminal?” She didn't, and neither did I. It's not on any airport diagram I've seen. You can't see it from the terminal. It was only when I looked at some aerial photography that I could see it, hidden behind earth banks. That's an example of how meticulous OSS's research is. Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who get upset because they can't see that trash can on the sidewalk outside the terminal. What is important to the virtual pilot is that an airport, and its surroundings, look realistic on the approach, and that this realism is maintained during the rollout and the taxi to the gate. And in all these respects, Gatwick 2004 satisfies a very close scrutiny First of all, on and around the runways, all the markings, and all the “furniture”, the masts, radars, and ILS transmitters are there, and in the right place. I particularly like the texture of the mown grass between the taxiways, you can almost smell it! Then, looking further a field, it's still as good. Some airports seem to stop at the perimeter fence, and be surrounded by generic autogen buildings that could be anywhere. For example, London Heathrow is often modelled without that distinctive row of major hotels just to the north of the fence, so it doesn't look real. In this version of Gatwick, OSS have modelled the car parks, the warehouses, the office buildings and the hotels that surround the airport itself, and provide a much greater sense of “being” there. As far as I can see, every single building is present, including the “temporary” Portacabins.
An important feature of Gatwick is the surrounding transportation system. To the east it has a spur from the motorway (freeway), roundabouts (rotaries), ramps, and overpasses. These are all well-modelled, and have cars (with headlights at night), although the traffic volume is quieter than I have ever seen. And then of course there is the railway line, and its station, now an integral part of the South Terminal. Again this is very accurate, the only criticism being that the trains come through every 15 seconds, well beyond the limits of the British railway signalling system! However the overall effect is that approaches from the east, with traffic rushing right and left under the airplane nose, look highly realistic.
The terminal buildings themselves, their linking monorail, and the monorail to Pier 3, are similarly well done. Throughout this package there is evidence of some very skilled texture work. Some of the details are very subtle but effective. I particularly like the fine crafting of the blast screens and floodlights. Approaching that most important area, the gate, the effect of realism is well-maintained, with moving service vehicles, tow trucks, and ground staff in luminous jackets waiting to turn the plane around. There is a very nice guidance system, although strangely it has no setting for a 737. At some gates, set the appropriate frequencies on your Nav radios, and the baggage train will appear and the catering truck will dock. The pier will also move up or down to the height of the plane, but since it doesn't actually move in and dock with the fuselage, I don't really see the point of that.
When night falls, the quality is still maintained. The floodlighting is very effective, with the right degree of fading into shadow around the edges, unlike the crude “circles of white paint” that you sometimes see. The building illumination is sufficiently varied, and the runway and taxi illumination is realistic. I understand that there was an issue with the taxiway lighting of OSS's London City, but there is no such problem here.
Two particular features are worth highlighting. On the roof of the South Terminal is a Handley Page Herald. Now planes on the top of buildings will be a familiar sight to OSS, living as they do in “Tornado Alley”! However tornados are rare in Sussex, and this plane is instead part of a “multimedia visitor attraction” at the top of the building. Needless to say, it's as well-executed as the rest of the package. Secondly, near the western end of the field, there is a dummy plane used for fire practice. Every day between noon and 1 pm, you can actually see the firemen showering it with foam. This is doubly remarkable because every English fireman that I know spends midday eating a well-earned lunch of sausage, fried egg, chips, baked beans and toast. Gatwick firemen are obviously a different breed.
Traffic
Traffic will only look realistic with the appropriate AFCAD file, which is why it is important to find and include the one that OSS have developed. Otherwise, the traffic will park inside buildings and taxi down the grass. I use Ultimate Traffic, whose AI planes can be seen in the photos. The traffic moves well round the airport. The AFCAD is bug-free and correct in that it prevents dual-runway operation, unlike the default Microsoft airport. The only error that I have spotted with the AFCAD is that the cargo stands are designated as “passenger”; this can be corrected with Lee Swordy's AFCAD program. A more serious problem with the scenery itself, is that the “Progressive Taxi” lines do not show up. OSS say that this is a problem with scenery heights, which they are working on. In the meantime, their advice is to use the taxiway chart that I referred to earlier. However Gatwick has a complex taxiway system, and ATC's instructions for taxiing to the gate sound like the original recipe for Alphabet Soup, so let's hope they fix it soon. Performance An airport scenery of this complexity will naturally cause some performance hit. My FPS measurements are shown below. (I have most sliders to the right, and 100% traffic)
The overall effect is an approximate halving of the FPS rate, but is certainly acceptable on a top-end machine. The scenery should still perform reasonably well on less powerful systems, assuming that the basic performance settings are not too ambitious. However I suspect that a 2000 or 2001 vintage machine would struggle to deliver a fluid performance. Summary What do flight simmers demand from airport scenery? They want something that looks as close to reality as possible, be it on approach, rolling down the runway, or taxiing to the gate. If they know the airport well, they want something that corresponds to their memories and keeps the simulation believable. If they don't know it, they want something that will still give them a feeling of “being there”. All of this requires good research and meticulous execution, and skills that are a combination of the artist and the technician. OSS's London Gatwick 2004 is a very exact and complete representation of the real thing, presented through the medium of FS2004. Flying into the airport, and taxiing around it, is a very believable experience. This scenery equals the standard of the best airport packages available at the moment. In terms of visual detail, it is very hard to fault. What lets it down are those details, such as the installation process, that make it slightly incomplete. For $24.95, it is at the upper end of the price range, and I personally would expect just that little bit more for the money. However, for the virtual pilot who would like to use Gatwick as their hub, or to fly in regularly, this package will give them hours of pleasure. *To buy this airport package, go to Online Simulation Solutions
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