Hello all, I have been looking at some of the beautiful and probably very time consuming to create airports. I am interested in the opinions of those who use them. Do you prefer only to purchase your home or favorite airport or do you have multiple airports. Are the base airports in msfs good enough if you just fly in and shut it down or do the addons increase the immersion that much more to justify the purchase. 
Thanks

Phill Dant

30 minutes ago, prdant said:

msfs good enough if you just fly in and shut it down or do the addons increase the immersion that much more to justify the purchase. 
Thanks

I actively avoid the default airports. They offend my sense of elegance.

I have two regions I usually fly in: Continental Europe and the States. I have bought a lot of the large hubs in both regions. It is worth it. I then look for freeware on FSTO that is significantly better than the default. Lastly, I will buy some other non-hubs if the area is nice and I will fly into it a lot.

I have a running Excel sheet that has all the handcrafted airports in my library, their ICAO code, and if i own it, or it's from FSTO. I do some YouTube stuff so I like to be able to easily see if the addon is free for my video notes. I also log my flights in the same Excel workbook so I have an entry for "Paid-don't have" so I can track how often I fly into an area to see if it's worth buying the airport.

The problem is, while the addons themselves aren't that expensive -- about the cost of lunch, usually -- it adds up fast. It doesn't help a lot of the content creators I follow show off new scenery and I get an "ohhh, shiny" moments.

The short answer is yes, they add to the immersion. I just need to exercise some self restraint.

I spend very little time looking around airports when I fly. Departure, I am setting up aircraft for the flight, taxi out and take off. Landing, I land, taxi to gate, shut down, and that's it. To me that is not worth the price of an airport, and since I fly all over the world in MSFS, that has almost 40,000 airports, even if they were $1 each, way too much money. Default airports look fine to me. 

Edited May 9, 20233 yr by Bobsk8

I refuse to fly to any default airports. So it becomes expensive.  But I find it worth it. 

You won't hear a definitive answer here. 😉 I know someone who refuses to fly into a default airport and whenever he wants to fly to a new destination he checks if a payware version is available and of so he buys it. If not then he checks if there is good freeware available. It all fails he won't fly there. Period. (EDIT And it wasn't Dave so there are more people like that LOL)

I absolutely don't get that. I would feel extremely limited. And extremely poor (he's got HUNDREDS of payware airports).

I myself hardly look at airports to check out things: I always focus on the instruments and only really look around when I am taxiiing. In which case I am not looking around to admire the buildings but to avoid getting off track. 😉 And during approach I think the default airports look perfectly fine. All the detail payware airports bring are totally wasted on me. Terminals with moving stuff and people... WHO CARES?! I don't, anyway.

I do sometimes notice that an airport looks pretty good (I can't help but owing the updated and free WU airports) and I can admire it as I drive around (and sometimes even understand people spend money on it) but I never leave my cockpit to check out some detail and whenever I reach a basic default airport I never think 'Boy, does this suck'. No, it's fine with me. As everything in MSFS is fine with me. 😉

Imho "if you just fly in and shut it down" the default airports are good enough. In fact, they are great! Take note that they are a TON better than the FSX of P3D default airports.

EDIT
In the end the question from the OP can only be answered by the OP. As is often the case with questions like these. 😉

Edited May 9, 20233 yr by tup61

I think it also depends on the type of flying you do. I do a lot of airliners, so how the gates look is very important to me. I like the ground  clutter, nice looking gates, and what I can see from the interior from the plane and apron.

Getting the airplane ready to go can take half an hour so I like to have nice things to look at.

For me, modelled interiors is a bit of a waste of time, money and FPS.  I really only look around the exteriors in most cases.  Whilst I understand that others may have a different view, I 'm really only interested in flying, weather, procedures, etc.  Nice scenery and airports that look great airside are all I want except perhaps an occasional new aeroplane.

The default airports are so much better than in the past.  In past FS games, you'd sometimes just get grey rectangles for buildings and nothing else.  In MSFS 2020, I'm impressed at the detail of even the really small GA airports.  In past sims, flying to a default airport was not a good experience. 

What I do is browse the library and look for sales.  I add a lot of things to my wishlist and check the sales.  Regular price can get expensive, but often I find airports 50% off or even more at times.  There's a lot of good deals out there if you keep an eye out.  I rarely pay full price for an airport.  If you use the wishlist, you can just open it up anytime and quick scroll through things you might want. 

I only fly GA anymore, so I'm only buying the small to medium sized airports, so the price isn't too high anyway.  There's a lot of great freeware out there too of course.  Still, a lot of payware airports are great quality and worth buying for me.  Again, I wait for sales and don't ever feel like I have to buy them. 

1 hour ago, prdant said:

I am interested in the opinions of those who use them.

Contrary to the flow here but I try to avoid them. There are some cons to use them.

1- Some have started to "impose" a log in to their site to use them even after you paid for the product. Any product that imposes added telemetry is not worth having, so I'm not a fan, I'll just leave that there.

2- Most of them add some sort of animation like vehicles or people walking ect.. which can impact FPS more than you think.

3- If ever there are changes to the airport like adding or removing runways, parking, ramps ect... the SIM and the NAV data will change but not the airport. It's rare but does/can happen.

Just my opinion.

 

It is a question of personal taste whether you use payware airports or not. You can spend $2000 every year if you always want to fly to a nice scenery, or nothing if you are fine with default airports. Most people will probably be somewhere between these two extremes. I would suggest the following.

- Think carefully about which airports you fly frequently to. IMHO, there is no point in spending $20 on an airport that you my fly to once.

- Once you know which airports are your favorites, check out Flightsim.to. With some luck, you may find a descent freeware airport that suits your needs. Quite a few airports there are better than a lot of poorly made payware airports. And even when there is a better payware alternative, you might be fine with the freeware version if you only fly there once or twice.

- If you found a payware airport that you like, buy it. You can then see for yourself whether it is worthwhile for you purchasing more.

1 hour ago, micstatic said:

I refuse to fly to any default airports. So it becomes expensive.  But I find it worth it. 

Agree. I do most flying in the US/Carribean/Mexico with mostly Southwest Airlines. If there is a payware airport available for a city they fly to, I buy it. There are still a few airports I bought and have yet to fly to, but to me it is worth it knowing that once I do make it there it will be much more immersive than a default airport. Especially the ones that the AI thinks the terminals are as tall as office buildings. 

With each World Update (and the original sim) Asobo includes 'enhanced' airports. There is a reason for this. They look much nicer and add to the realism. Ditto payware and good freeware airports.Those who have no interest in the way the sim looks could save a fortune by re installing FSX.

Edited May 9, 20233 yr by jarmstro

24 minutes ago, FPStewy said:

 

3- If ever there are changes to the airport like adding or removing runways, parking, ramps ect... the SIM and the NAV data will change but not the airport. It's rare but does/can happen.

Just my opinion.

 

I don’t use default msfs nav or maps. Only payware airplanes with navigraph uodates. So moot for me.   
I don’t care about interiors as long as it looks good from outside. But to me the airport ground experience is just as important as actual flying. I fly a lot in real life and the realistic airports add massively to the immersion. But that’s me 

51 minutes ago, tup61 said:

I know someone who refuses to fly into a default airport and whenever he wants to fly to a new destination he checks if a payware version is available and of so he buys it. If not then he checks if there is good freeware available. It all fails he won't fly there.

This describes me pretty well! I generally will not fly to a non-payware airport. I am not interested in interiors, but I do like the airport to be a faithful representation of what is actually there, the terminal and gate layout, taxiways, etc. I fly a lot of GA and when it is airliners it is usually corporate or cargo and so I want the GA and cargo areas of the airport to be present and realistic looking. I look forward to my Thursday evening browsing of the new releases. That said, it needs to be an airport I will fly to regularly and that is good quality. In terms of cost, it can add up for sure but I have found that being thoughtful about which airports to buy, and diligently waiting for sales, reduces the cost. There are really very few airports I have bought that are not on sale. The sales are so frequent that just waiting a month or so will save a good chunk of change. I just looked and so far this year I have spent about $200 dollars, so probably around $400 per year.

In Aug 2020 I got sucked in briefly by the knee-jerk purchasing of 3rd party airports (legacy behavior from FSX/P3D) and bought about 5 airports until I learned default airports are often nothing short of marvelous.  In fact, I've unstalled 1 of those 5 airports as it was way too hard on performance yet wasn't a whole lot better than default.  There are some bugged airports, like KDEN which has severe elevation defects, but few others suffer like that one does.  There is another significant caveat:  some default airports don't have good night lighting.  Here are a few default airports to illustrate:

Medellin CO:

Rio DJ, Brazil: