Aerosoft Mega Airport Vienna for FS2004

By Andrew Herd (24 September 2006)

here are airport sceneries and there are airport sceneries, but if there are any that are guaranteed to make me seriously enthusiastic, it is Aerosoft's Mega Airport series - if ever FS scenery could be considered to be art, I would put these up as a contender, along with the GeoRender fields. What makes the Mega Airports special is the sheer attention to detail by the developer, Fly Tampa, who can justifiably say that they have played a part in taking addon airports to the next level. Once upon a time, the rules were that when you bought an addon airport, that was what you got, no more and no less, developers considering their responsibilities to end at the boundary hedge, and that was usually a two dimensional billboard graphic that looked plain awful. Fly Tampa, however, give you the whole enchilada, including areas of phototextures, visual reference points, rivers, refineries and untrimmed grass at the edge of the taxiways.

Given that Mega Airport Frankfurt got a gold AAA, I was extremely keen to see what Fly Tampa could do with Vienna, which has several advantages over Frankfurt, not least the fact that it sits in a loop of the Donau river and serves what must be one of the most picturesque cities in Europe. It has an interesting history, having been built for military use in 1938, before being taken over by the British in 1945. At that time it only had a single runway, but from 1959 onwards, the facilities were steadily expanded, with a series of runway extensions and new builds and additional terminals - when it is completed, the new Skylink terminal will be capable of handling the largest iron around, including the A380. LOWW is commonly known as Schwechat, after the nearest town and it boasts a state of the art tower with a laser night show; discussions about construction of a third runway are in progress as it is envisaged that the airport will have to be expanded even more in the future. For now, planes up to 747 and A340 size can be handled comfortably and just about every major European airline flies in, the major operator being Austrian Airlines, which in addition to its vast range of short haul flights, takes passengers as far afield as Beijing, Sydney and Washington. The bottom line is that there is plenty of potential for simmers.

The package comes in a rather satisfying cardboard box, a tradition with Aerosoft and a sign that you can expect something a little different. Personally, I hope Aerosoft stay with this form of packaging, because although it takes up a little more space, it is far easier to identify product on the shelf and it provides plenty of room for the contents. System requirements are given on the outside of the box as FS2004, Windows XP, a 2.0 Ghz processor or better, 512 Mb of RAM, a 3D graphics card with 128 Mb of RAM and 150 Mb of free hard disk space. My standard disclaimer follows which is: 'I am sure you can run this addon on a 2 Gig system, but you will get much better frame rates on the fastest box you can lay your hands on'. The bottom line is that you cannot have detail and speed; there is always a trade-off.

Inside the box you get a CD-ROM, an 18 page manual in German and English and a large format set of Jeppesen plates, which is one of the benefits of going for a cardboard box over a standard DVD-style pack. The plates are comprehensive and I suggest studying the airport diagram at the very least, because otherwise you will get lost like I did. The version I reviewed was 1.2, which fixes some minor stuff including the wrong ILS frequency for 29 and various incompatibility fixes (if you have an earlier version, the fix is on the Fly Tampa website, which also has an optional download of static aircraft).

Installation was triggered by sticking the CD in the drive, the only user intervention being to enter the serial number and check boxes to install compatibility fixes with Austrian Airports, Austria Pro and Ultimate Terrain Europe. I reviewed the addon with UT Europe installed and also with the Flight1 Ground Environment textures installed and it all went extremely well together, allowing for the inevitable slight mismatches between the airport phototextures and their surroundings. The installation creates a program group with links to PDF versions of the German and English manuals, which differ slightly from the printed versions in that someone has actually read them and deleted all the references to Mega Airport Frankfurt - poor copy editing is another Aerosoft tradition (-:

Reading the manual won't occupy much of your time, as the English version runs to a total of five pages and the German to little more. Admittedly, there isn't much to say about an airport, other than, 'go use it', but prior Aerosoft releases have included a couple of paragraphs on the history of the airport and sights to see, not to mention how to operate air gates and stuff of that ilk. Where Vienna is concerned, all we are told for definite is that Fly Tampa have 'corrected several features, including rivers, roads and forests' in the vicinity of the airport. They sell themselves short, because as you can see, the developers have done much more than that and you get a wide variety of off-airport scenery, much of it animated and set among some well chosen areas of phototextures and bespoke landclassing.

I did the testing using Wilco's 737 PIC, which is an ideal plane for goofing around in, if you understand how to use the more complex FS2004 airliners. This sim would have got an award if it had had a more extensive manual, but as it is, it is damned good and I find myself using it a great deal - it neatly fills the gap left by the DreamFleet 737. Maybe DreamFleet will bring that back for FSX?

The first thing you will notice when you load the scenery, if you belong to the Distinguished Order of Turn and Burn Simmers like me, is that the plane doesn't appear bang on the threshold. Apart from the fact that this is against the natural law of flight simulation, which states that aircraft must always load on the dotted line, it makes a nice change and works rather well - so if other developers choose to take it up, we won't be upset. Even if it is an act of heresy.

As you shake your head at the chutzpah of a developer who can take such liberties with FS2004's interpretation of the active runway, you will notice two other things. The first is that the ground textures are absolutely top notch and fit together better than the blocks of concrete at the real airport probably do. The second is that there is untrimmed grass growing along the edges of the taxiways, where the grass cutter has been unable to put the mower over the edge of the taxiway for fear of smashing the blades. If you stop the plane and get out (never popular with the passengers, but in FS2004, we are in charge) and take a really good look, you will notice that all the runway signs, lighting, PAPI and the rest are all executed to a much higher standard than you would normally see. In general, developers tend to economise effort on features on the far side of airports, on the basis that few simmers ever get to look at them, but Fly Tampa see it differently.

Depending on which direction you take off, you will be greeted with views of the Donau, which looks a little peculiar against the default scenery, because Microsoft have put their Donau in the wrong place. Quite why so many European rivers should find themselves misplaced in FS2004 is a mystery to me and the Donau isn't exactly a trickle. Anyway, if you have Ultimate Terrain Europe installed, as I had for the review, or Austria Professional (I assume), the river matches up perfectly. Other sites include the city of Vienna and a large refinery, which belches smoke and no doubt makes a generous contribution to global warming. The refinery, for what it is worth, looks great and I only wish all FS refineries were as convincingly unattractive.

Just about everything worth animating is animated in the airport, including the AGNIS systems, but with the exception of the air gates, which does wonders for frame rates, but will disappoint some. Nor do you get the comfort wagons driving up to you once the engines are shut down, or follow me cars, but to all the people who are thinking 'So why give it an award then?' I would say, 'Just look at what else you get, for Pete's sake!' The addon appears to include a very good AFCAD file and with MyTraffic 2006 running, the mix of taxiing aircraft, animated vehicles, moving cranes, factory smoke and the whole look of the package made it appear very convincing indeed. The animations, by the way, do not stop on the airport, because if you look closely, there are vehicles using the Autobahn, but they do not (hold tight, another shocking revelation coming) extend to the inside of the buildings. Yep, if you are the sort of simmer who buys addon airports so you can look around inside the buildings, this one is not for you - the buildings are empty.

What else? The ground textures are seasonal, which is neat, and there is a very good set of night textures. Against the default night textures, these make the airport stand out so much you can see it from 30 miles away, but it looks much more realistic embedded in the Ultimate Terrain Europe set; although whichever textures you have installed, the refinery looks great at night, so good in fact, that I couldn't resist flying upside down in between the cooling towers.

All in all, you couldn't hope for much more in a scenery, or at least, not in one that didn't kill frame rates stone dead. I have seen more detailed sceneries, with moving air stairs and so much detail inside the buildings that you felt like taking a seat, but I haven't seen any sceneries which managed to square the circle of doing both those things and remaining usable. In the final analysis, Mega Airport Vienna is the best large airport scenery I have seen to date, beating even Mega Airport Frankfurt.

And that is saying something.