Arlanda (ICAO: ESSA) serves as the main international airport of Sweden, which is one of the largest countries in the northern part of Europe - the region known as Scandinavian. Arlanda is located 40 km north of the nation's capitol - Stockholm and is the largest airport in Sweden and the largest of three major airports in the Stockholm City metropolitan area (Stockholm-Bromma Airport and Stockholm-Skavsta Airport being the two other airports).
Arlanda is the third largest airport in the Nordic countries, and the second busiest in terms of international passengers. The airport was used by 17 million passengers in 2010, with 13 million international passengers and 4 million domestic. Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has its head office nearby and the Oxford Aviation Academy has a flight simulator center for some of the most common airliners of today (like Boeing 737) at Arlanda.
Arlanda is located within the province of Uppland and is an important hub for both the Stockholm region and Scandinavia, primarily thanks to aviation, with 167 destinations around the world, but also due to its good ground transport services to and from other parts of the Stockholm region and Stockholm City. Stockholm-Arlanda serves as a major hub for Nextjet, Norwegian Air Shuttle, Scandinavian Airlines and Skyways Express.
Like other Aerosoft software, this add-on is very easy to download and install. Simply unzip the downloaded folder and choose the proper add-on for your version of Flight Simulator. Click on the installer and follow the screen.
If you ever visited Arlanda Airport in Flight Simulator, you will be blown away when you load this new scenery. On a global scale, Arlanda isn't that big an airport and that is obvious in the default Arlanda scenery that comes with FSX. It is indeed boring with just the runways, taxiway and the gate/jetway area. Mega Airport Stockholm Arlanda X expands the scenery tremendously in both numbers of buildings included and the quality of the current buildings from the default scenery, including areas outside the airport.
Arlanda Airport is surrounded by forests and these has been rearranged and recreated to match the real scenery more accurately. This goes as well for the whole arriving area, including the main roads leading to the airport. Instead of just being some lines on some green texture, Aerosoft gives you real looking highways that leads to the airport's passenger drop off zone. These highways run very nicely under some of the airport taxiways, like in the real world. I like that kind of attention to the detail. If you look at the edge of the add-on scenery you will see that some of roads and highways don't really match to the connecting roads and highways from the overlapping default scenery. Outside the airport, you also find a huge parking facility with some connecting office buildings, which looks like the parking area for the airport staff.
Inside the airport, the runways and taxiways have gotten a makeover with smoother textures, enhanced signs and very nice markings on the runways and taxiways. Most of the buildings in the airport are nicely modeled, with no interior present. Only at the check in area, where the passengers wait for their flight, has some transparency. You can't really see anything through the glass, but you have some sensation of something going on behind the window. As in a real airport of this scale, you find all kind of trailers and vehicles left standing around in the airport. Arlanda is no exception. When walking around inside the airport, you will see cargo trucks, baggage trailers, cars and busses. All stationary and most moving objects are very nicely modeled and look very alike. One exception is a yellow passenger bus that driving between the airport terminals. It doesn't really look nice and the animation is a bit poor. When it moves, it looks like a big yellow rectangular box, rather than a bus. I don't know why Dream Factory Studio chooses to leave it like this, but personally I preferred if they had left it out.
As far as I can judge, the overall layout of the airport is accurate. A great deal of the area is made as photorealistic texture. That mean that parking areas, buildings and hangars look nice from above, but when you reach the ground on approach and taxi along the same texture, you will not see it. I assume Dream Factory Studio did this to keep the frame rates up. It is very much a question of taste whether or not this takes away the sensation of being in a "real" airport once you are on the ground and becoming an issue.
In the default scenery Microsoft didn't bother to put any lights on Arlanda. Only the runway has small lights after dark. With Mega Airport Stockholm Arlanda X the airport comes alive at night with smooth and realistic looking lighting around the jetways, along the taxiways and at the passenger drop off zone. This is a small thing, but it gives you the satisfying feeling of landing in a major airport, rather than a random corn field in the countryside.
It would be unfair to expect no loss of frames from an add-on that adds so much to the default scenery as Mega Airport Stockholm Arlanda X does. That was however what I experienced using the default Boeing 737-800 on a short flight from Kastrup - Copenhagen to Arlanda Stockholm. That is really impressive. When I used add-on aircraft like CLS Boeing 747-200 and PMDG Jetstream 41, I experienced some frame rate loss compared to the default airport scenery, but nothing serious if you own a up-to-date computer system.
I have mixed feelings about this Mega Airport Stockholm Arlanda X. Taking everything into consideration I like this version of Stockholm's largest airport. It is accurate and nicely done. Dream Factory Studio has a nice sense of detail in their work from other sceneries, that's why I can't help being a bit disappointed about the modeling errors in the scenery and the use of photorealistic texture. I enjoy taxiing around in a airport scenery and get the feeling of "the real thing", not just from 1500 feet. Having said that, Mega Airport Stockholm Arlanda X still gives you a huge improvement from the default scenery and to a reasonable price - that is worth something.
Ricky Petersen
r.petersen@net.telenor.dk
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