Nope, not the latest Harry Potter. I have a question concerning the tower viewpoint. Background: I have long found this view useless and mostly ignored it. It always took a long time to load and was disorienting and difficult to figure out where the viewer was located. Further, in many cases all I could see was a side of hill. It appeared that the tower was way off in the wilderness. However, recently I began exploring with AFCAD2. I am a complete novice at AFCAD2 but was examing some airports I downloaded (more questions on THAT later). I didn't want to mess with much but I did discover that most did not have a tower viewpoint defined or had it in the wrong location/height relative to the scenery tower itself. Using slew, for my most visited airports I began defining or adding tower viewpoints at the exact lat/lon/roof of the actual tower. At nontowered airports, I added a 6' virtual "plane spotter" standing just outside the FBO or on the apron in front of GA parking. Zoom at 1X for "as real as it gets". Much fun watching my self taxi and take the runway...Question: My new tower viewpoints seem to stick at my origin at loading but be completely ignored when I arrive at my destination. Staring into unrecognizable space again or I can see the aircraft but the viewpoint is some arbitrary point. I looked in the stock airports and most don't have tower views defined at all. One might expect then, that the stock AFD is in use at arrival and some default is in place, but the new gates etc are present in the game itself. Has anyone encountered this or have any ideas? Is this a scenery level problem (AFCADs in the add-on layer)? Have gotten hopelessly preoccupied with a ridiculus backwater aspect of the sim? Thanks

No. The tower view is actually quite useful and simple to use.In the simulator, select Aircraft, then Map from the menu. On the map, you will see the airplane icon in the center. There is a second icon that resembles a control tower. You may have to zoom out considerably if the tower icon is not in view. Click and drag the icon to move it. That sets the tower view location. Zooming in on the map allows you to set the tower location very precisely with respect to the aircraft or airport. Click ok to return to the simulator.To adjust the height of the tower viewpoint, click View, then View Options. There is a combo box, select tower view. Then options, including tower height (expressed Above Ground Level) are available for you to set.

I was adjusting the tower in the AFCAD itself. i was finding that the tower values worked well when I load the airport but were reset when I arrived at it as a destination. I had assumed that the tower view options applied to all airports (sort of default, like the spot view options) i was looking for custom options, specific to the placement of the tower object at the airport in question. However, i will play a bit more with this when i get back to the sim. As I said, not an important metter! Thanks.

Tower view stays locked to the departure airport as defined in the AFCAD for that airport, except that when you travel long distances the view will no longer really resemble anything that could be viewed from your departure tower since FS doesn't really recognize the curvature of the earth. You can't get FS to automatically switch to your arrival airport's tower view. Accordingly, the only way to get tower view on arrival is to move the tower view position in map view as suggested above.

Thanks Misha. I've done some more testing and am beginning to understand better. From my testing, and as you suggest, the tower view will reflect the AFCAD if you use the airport as a point of departure and initialize it by loading. WRT arrival, when you arrive and taxi to a gate, the tower view there will be something arbitrary (and generally undesirable and useless) even if you have one defined in the AFD. Too bad. I guess there is still some value in me setting the tower view to correspond to the physical location of the tower in the scenery by manipulating the AFCADs of my favorite airports. (or in map view, which is a little less accurate for non-stock airports.) It could be nice at departure. Pausing to manipulate the tower view upon arrival seems like overkill, so I guess I'll ignore it.