Introduction and Background This package contains a selection of airports in Northern England, ranging in size from busy regional airports like Leeds-Bradford and the Isle of Man, to small private fields like Netherthorpe and Skegness. Also included is one of my favorite GA airfields in the area, the rather quaintly-named Sherburn-in-Elmet. There are 9 RAF airfields too, including RAF Scampton, the home of the Red Arrows aerobatic team, and RAF Coningsby, where the Battle of Britain flight is based. I know RAF Coningsby rather well, as I was stationed there for 3 years. During my time there (1974-1976), they had MD Phantom FGR2's (on which I was employed as an aircraft systems tech.), nowadays I believe Tornados are stationed there, as well as the Battle of Britain flight already mentioned. Another one of the airfields that I know rather well is Huddersfield EGND, back then it was called Crossland Moor,(or Huddersfield International, as we used to say as a joke), and is only a 15 minute drive away on the other side of the valley from where I grew up in the sixties. From our house you could see the aircraft approaching Crossland Moor over on the other side of the valley. Back then Sir David Brown was a regular visitor there with his DeHavilland Dove, as it was the nearest airfield to his factories in Huddersfield and Meltham, which he visited regularly on business. I have watched his Dove landing and taking off many times as a kid, I used to hang around there a lot watching the traffic come and go. Nowadays it is mostly used for private flying as far as I am aware, with a visit from the occasional AirTaxi aircraft. Take a look at the smaller of the two hangars in the screenshot of "Huddersfield International" very carefully: I earned stick time in a Cessna 150 by helping to build that, although they have further extended it since then by the looks of it. I can"t remember it being so big, but maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, we're talking about 30 years ago here.
I have also flown in and out of Netherthorpe a few times too, in a rather drafty old Piper Tri-Pacer owned back then by a nice old man called Henry Fawcett, who must be over a hundred now if he is still alive. They seem to have improved it a bit since then, I remember it as little more than a field surrounded by a rather high hedge, and now it has 2 proper grass runways, with runway markings too! Altogether in this package you have 35 airfields to fly in and out of, and they make flying GA VFR in this area of England a lot more fun than with the default airfields from FS, believe me. Istallation and Documentation This package comes as a CD and costs 19.99 UK Pounds, or €29.95, or $29.99, plus delivery if outside of the UK. If you are living in Europe, I suppose it would be worth a try to order it paying in $US, due to the better exchange rate against the Euro, not sure if that works though. The CD comes packaged in a DVD case, along with a "Pilots Handbook", which turns out to be a manual full of useful information, and I advise reading it before the install, and also afterwards if you experience any problems. After the install is finished, you will find an entry in the program list called "JustFlight", where you can select scenery type, AI traffic density and extra static aircraft etc. The documentation is quite comprehensive, and explains all you need to know, including system requirements, accessing the airports, extra static aircraft and AI etc, etc. There are also notes about scenery and terrain compatibility, and how to set FS up so it runs as well as possible. Last, but not least, there are also detailed instructions about how to install and uninstall the software. Performance This add-on is for FS2002 and FS2004. I tested it with FS2004, which I guess is what most people are using these days. The minimum recommendations are: 1.7Ghz, WinXP, 512mb RAM, and a 3D graphic card with at least 32MB of memory. From what I saw during testing, that's certainly realistic. At any rate, on my system, which at best could be classed as upper middle-class these days, and certainly not "cutting edge", it ran very well indeed. I tested it with VFR England and Wales scenery and terrain, which I already had installed, together with various state-of-the-art add-on aircraft, and had no problems with stuttering etc. With the fps locked at 30, it rarely dropped down under 25. Designer Gary Summons has managed to code it so that it is very smooth with this high level of detail, I have to say it looks excellent. I actually got better performance with this scenery than with the default FS scenery at KSEA, which is pretty amazing. Appearance
All the airports are nicely done with realistic-looking textures and lots of detail all over the place, with all the eye-candy like light masts, parked cars, service vehicles, realistic hangars and buildings, and groups of people standing around etc. Some of the airports even have active stands. Also, you get accurate runway and taxiway textures, and British-style runway and taxiway lighting, as the lighting in England differs considerably to what you get in FS as default. The width of the runways and taxiways have also been adjusted to the more realistic (for England) dimensions, and all the runway and taxiway markings are also as they really are in England. It blended in very well with the VFR scenery and terrain from www.VisualFlight.co.uk on the whole, although with some terrain add-ons (for example Lagos Terramesh, according to the manual), it is possible that you will experience some visual problems with the "plateau effect" where the airfield is on a plateau instead of blending in with the scenery. To be fair, this problem is mentioned in the manual, although it is not the fault of the scenery. The cause is an FS "feature"; due to which FS can only display airfields and their runways as being flat , which of course in real life they rarely are. Add-on mesh, on the other hand, displays the terrain as it really is, at least a lot more accurately then the default FS mesh, which can lead to these problems, depending on the LOD and accuracy of the mesh data. It was never so bad that it really detracted from the pleasure of using this scenery, and can"t be helped until MS re-codes FS in this respect. Maybe in FS10? As with so many other add-ons, it does as well as it can within the limitations of FS. It is worth remembering that "As real as it gets" isn't the same as "As real as it could be if MS re-wrote certain features of the program code." At any rate, it is worlds better than the default stuff, which seems to get progressively more unrealistic the further away you get from the continental US. The way Europe looks in the default version of FS has nothing at all in common with how Europe REALLY looks, and add-on sceneries like this do a lot to make it more believable and enjoyable. It's just the thing for doing VFR in GA aircraft, the people who only fly over England at FL350 watching the FMC fly the aircraft won't be interested I guess, for the GA flyers among us I'd say it's definitely worth consideration. Summary Is it worth buying? In my opinion, the answer is a resounding yes! For a reasonable price you get a nicely-crafted scenery package with 35 airfields (some of which are not even reproduced at all in the default FS, Huddersfield EGND for example), and that is so cleverly coded that FS is not reduced to a slide-show when you crank up the eye-candy. I loved it, although I have to admit I am a bit biased due to being so familiar with the area from my childhood and teen days. Nevertheless, for a real impression of how flying GA in England looks and feels, it can't be beat. It's worth mentioning that this is just one of a whole series of British Airports volumes, and I would guess that they are all of this high quality. The designer Gary Summons has been on the scene a long time, he has a good reputation among long-time simmers, and judging from the quality of this volume, I would definitely buy the others too, if I could afford them all.
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