Benjamin J

Just to add my impression after flying EHCA-HEGN over the weekend. It's definitely nicer than I thought. I have Tai Models' Cairns, which I thought was so-so. It seems they improved the skills since then. I agree with others that it's a little on the pricy side for what it is, but it performed well, looked quite nice and seems fairly accurate. Overall I like the scenery and will return here for more flying. The one problem I had was that literally none of the airport layout, including all gates, showed up on the world map... Though I saw an update today that's suppose to fix that, so I'll have a look sometime later this week to see if indeed they did

Thanks for the reviews guys! I actually pulled the trigger and got it yesterday night... Didn't see it was available at OrbX though, otherwise probably would have bought it there! Will do a flight later today or tomorrow and report back.

Glad performance is fine for you! And what are your thoughts in terms of the visuals? They look decent on the screenshots but how does it look in-sim? I don’t need it to be at the level of FlightBeam but perhaps about as good as iniBuilds?

I agree I was hoping ACO would be a little better than it ended up being. Still leagues ahead of DoubleT which is almost entirely inaccurate. No other RCTP that I’m aware of.

Hello all, I saw TAI Models released Cairo HECA for MSFS on Simmarket: https://secure.simmarket.com/taimodels-cairo-international-airport-heca_msfs.phtml I'm tempted as I really want an upgrade from the Asobo version, but my impression of TAI Models sceneries has not been the best and I didn't read the best of reviews for their Manchester scenery. So, before I get this I was wondering what other people's thoughts are? Would love to hear some opinions and reviews.

I generally really like the city packs, but do feel that the airports that are sometimes included can be a letdown. It kind of depends pack to pack and the newer ones certainly are much better than the earlier ones. Recently flew into Guangzhou and thought that one looked very nice, but performance was actually not that good. I have nearly all of the packs at this moment aside for the Canadian pack and the two Chinese airports that are currently released only on the marketplace, which are Kunming and Tianjin. But if and once they are released on OrbX, I’ll get those as well.

Looks a lot cleaner than I remember it being 😂 All joking aside, models do look rather accurate. I have FSDG but may buy iniBuilds down the line on a sale.

Didn't buy a single one of them. Didn't have high expectations, but did think it'd be better than it is. Call me insane if you like.

I bought it as well because I really wanted to fo some present day A340 flying, e.g. Kam Air OAKB-VIDP. I think @chansen is spot on. I found out side the plane looks really good, but that's more or less where it ends for me. I agree the VC looks rather flat. Indications on screens tend to be incorrect in size and shape (often too small). More buttons that I expected are functional, but there are a fair amount of bugs that make behavior unpredictable. E.g. when I turned on the APU and disconnected ground power, the whole cockpit lost power besides the indication that APU GEN was providing power and was connected to the electrical network. On taxi didn't encounter any issues, and didn't have issues with turns, unless I didn't understand what @ErichB was alluding to? Climb-out seems unusually overpowered and there are some drawing errors of the route on the ND. The autopilot was more precise than I expected with following the route, and it has the capability of inserting SIDs and STARs, so you can be semi-realistic in your flight planning. I thought the EFB was a little clunky, sort of like the iniBuilds A300 EFB at its very first iteration. Approach and landing was very imprecise. No oscilations and such as some other airplanes do but it would react very late to the LOC and would frequently deviate. Upon AP disconnect plane was hard to control and floated over the runway massively before awkwardly bumping onto the runway. Granted, haven't flown a heavy in a while so that probably didn't help either. My feeling is that there is quite a lot of potential, but in its current form I'm probably parking this plane until it sees improvements.

Ooh... You know what, I probably got them mixed up -.- Sorry!

Isn’t verticalsim also working on palm beach? May want to wait for that one…

Yes. I believe it's how MSFS loads 'more detailed' tiles of ground textures. That is, the further away something is, the lower the resolution of the loaded tiles. if there are differences in the coloration of the Bing maps' tiles between two different resolutions, the more detailed tiles will reflect that as 'change in coloration'. The fact is that this is nothing new. This system of loading tiles was present all the way back to at least FS2004, and likely before (but I didn't use those so I have no idea). Conversely, I have found in South Korea that highres tiles actually don't exist at all, so in a defined radius under my aircraft I will see default 'offline' textures popping in, with lowres satellite imagery from Bing maps farther away. I don't think there is anything that can be done about it accept for Bing maps' data or the Azure system that processes it for MSFS to have better cross-coloration.

This is interesting because I've started running into strange instability with MSFS following the Dune and Windows updates. Do you mean the small KB updated from last week or the bugger 23H2 feature update? I installed the formner. I might try to roll back to before that Windows update and see if that resolves things. Currently I'm finding MSFS will randomly crash or hang in ways I've never seen before. Do you know specifically which updates were the most recent February offending ones (KB numbers)?

I had that spinning circle as well and it went away after restart, but I've also been seeing a lot of instability in MSFS. This weekend I've had MSFS randomly crash on me three times, without any seeming reason and event viewer just claims there was an application hang and Windows shut MSFS down. When I managed to fly from PANC to PACV I found performance quite a bit more stuttery than it had been with quite a lot of stutters upon touchdown. Hadn't seen this behavior in a long, long time... Besides the Dune update there was also a seemingly minor Windows update, though not sure what that did. I also installed Tailstrike Prague, Amsim/BMW KMIA and... a third scenery, don't remember what. Never had any issues after scenery install so must be related to the Windows update or Duna update, I'd think.

To you and others, thanks for pointing that out! Haven't gotten around to try it yet, but will do so soon. It seems likely that this was it because I had already set the DH when this happened... Typically I'd wait until a later point but I was a little bored so I started setting things up for approach. Thanks all!