In August of 2008, Dave "Opa" Marshall posted a guide "Creating VIP Parking in FSX", which I had seabed and have tried several times. This allows your FSX aircraft to be assigned a unique gate at an airport, and is very useful for arriving aircraft if you have a preference for a specific gate to park at, and it provides taxi instructions to that specific gate (rather than the generic "taxi to the gate" that you can otherwise get with the default FSX ATC).

 

I'm about to try this again with a recent re-install of FSX, and would like to use the NGX as my aircraft (I posted here as this has more to do with FSX than the NGX). The guide has me editing the parking gate radius in an airport editor, and making similar changes to the aircraft.cfg file for the aircraft to match up a specific gate to a specific aircraft. Has anyone tried to do this another way without the need to edit both the airport (I do have an airport editor ) and/or the aircraft.cfg file (which will require re-doing after most SPs I imagine). I have also had issues in trying to edit the airport when it's an add-on and not an FSX stock airport- but once it works this is amazing stuff- Dave, you contributed so much to our hobby!

 

Thanks, Bruce.

Hi Bruce.

 

Yes, I've done it with my NGX. I primarly fly just the American Airlines paint, so in my repaint section of the aircrafts .cfg, I placed the following two lines.

 

atc_parking_types=GATE, RAMP

atc_parking_codes=AAL

 

It's important to make sure the "S" in at the end of codes, otherwise it wont work.

 

As far as the editing the ADE files and the parking gate radius, I have not had to do that, unless the airport in which I am flying to has the wrong radius already set for the a/c to park anyway and/or the airports ADE file is missing the parking code for my airline. Generally speaking though, most airports I have from FSDT, FlyTampa and such have the correct parking codes and radiius in the ADE file already so its not necessary to edit them. Although I have had to adjust some of my BluePrint airports gate radius' to fit my NGX into the gate for American Airlines.

 

I'll tell you that it works like a charm and its nice to be able to fly into my domestic airports and contact ground and be sent to the correct gate. The only time it hasn't worked for me aside from the parking code or radius being correct is if the airlines gate I am using is already full, then it will send me to the next available random parking spot, but its rare that it happens.

Thanks for your reply and information on how you are doing this. Yes, having ATC direct us to the arrival gate is the icing on the cake- as any RW pilot knows, almost the most difficult portion of the flight!

 

Thanks, Bruce.