Aerosoft German Airports 3 for FS2002/FS2004

By Andrew Herd (27 June 2006)

egular readers will be familiar with the German Airports series, the first part of which saw the light of day for FS5.1/FS95/FS98 back in 1998 and has been upgraded and extended ever since, making it one of the longest-running sets of FS addons in history. At the time of writing, we have German Airports parts 1 to 4, each of which simulates half a dozen or so fields, varying in size from international airports down to GA setups - in addition to which, Aerosoft have released 'Mega Airport Frankfurt', which I reviewed a few weeks back and liked a great deal. 2006 marks a watershed for Aerosoft and its many loyal customers, because whereas at one time the most sophisticated airports Aerosoft did could always be found under the 'German Airports' label, the appearance of Mega Airport Frankfurt - and the announcement of Mega Airport Vienna - creates a new and higher tier of single airport sceneries and it is difficult to imagine that this will not impose some kind of ceiling on the quality that the multi-airport packs will be allowed to achieve. However the German Airports packages have always delivered great value for money and it is very hard to imagine anyone being disappointed with them, or with their French, Scandinavian or Spanish counterparts for that matter.

I haven't had an opportunity to see German Airports 3 since the FS2002 days, so when the package was listed in the Pilot Shop, it seemed a good opportunity to revisit the series and find out what was new. One thing that hasn't changed is Aerosoft's packaging - they have stuck to the trademark 'German Airports' cardboard box, which I was delighted to find contained a set of large format approach plates and a printed manual in addition to the installation CD. DVD-style cases might be all the rage now and they are certainly easy to stack on a shelf, but I have a soft spot for the Aerosoft card boxes because they have contained so many treats in the past. And you don't need a PhD in origami to get the contents back in again once you have opened them, either.

Hardware requirements are quoted on the box lid as: FS2002 or FS2004, a 2.4 Ghz processor or better, 256 Mb of RAM, a 3D video card with 32 Mb of RAM and 120 Mb of free hard disk space. After testing the software, I should voice my suspicion that although a 2.4 Ghz system should be adequate to run the addon, it might struggle if you added in 100% third party AI, a high 3D cloud percentage and then flew in using a complex airliner addon. So I will leave you to chant the FS mantra: 'You can always do with a more megahertz!'. Sure enough, in the manual, Aerosoft recommend at least a 2.6 Ghz system with a 128 meg video card.

The seven airports included in the current version of GA3 are:

Berlin-Tegel EDDT
Hamburg EDDH
Lubeck EDHL
Kiel EDHK
Bremen EDDW
Monchengladbach EDLN
Dusseldorf International EDDL

Which is one less than there used to be in the package - Erfurt having been dropped for no adequately explained reason. However, the seven airports the developers have left still represent a good choice, given the spread of different types of field and of geographic location. Kiel, for example, is a relatively small operation right up on the northern coast at the entrance to the Baltic, which supports a certain amount of military traffic as far as I am aware, while Dusseldorf is a large international airport slap in the center of Germany. Hamburg and Lubeck (better known as Blankensee) are only short flights from Kiel; Blankensee being known for its large GA presence, while you would be extremely lucky to get a Cessna into Hamburg. Berlin-Tegel was built at very short notice during the airlift as an alternative to the Gothic grandeur of Templehof, which got kind of busy, as you might imagine - and Tegel has expanded ever since, while Templehof has had to live within the constraints of its location and historic buildings. Finally, we have Monchengladbach, which is a small to medium sized airfield hosting a mix of commuter services and GA flights. In short, there is something for everyone.

It is worth noting in passing that Aerosoft's policy of choosing a spread of geographical locations means that if you are trying to get all the major airports in a particular part of Germany you will have to buy more than one of their packages - for example, Templehof is in GA4 - but on the other hand, think of all the fun you will have exploring places far from home.

Installation is a simple matter of putting the CD in the drive, typing in the license key and choosing which version (FS2002 or FS2004) you wish to install, before selecting from a list of compatibility options, all of which relate to other Aerosoft addons, such as the complementary Scenery Germany packages. While the drive was whirring away, I took the opportunity to read the manual, which is a bilingual effort in German and English. As the readme suggests, the statement that the airports should be found using the 'search addon scenery option' is incorrect and planes can be moved to them in the usual way. If you want to see everything the scenery has to offer, you will need to set 'scenery complexity' to 'very dense', with 'addon dynamic scenery' checked and set to 'very dense' as well, or you will deprive yourself of all the moving airport vehicles. In a similar vein, Autogen density should be set to 'very dense' or 'extremely dense', or some of the off-airport enhancements will not appear.

A full set of AI traffic files are added by the installation, so if you are using an addon like MyTraffic 2006, the aprons will fill with AI planes, although beware of the effect this can have on frame rates. As is the rule with addon airport sceneries, Aerosoft don't supply any extra AI planes with German Airports 3, so if you are the proud owner of a virgin FS2004 installation, none of the snazzy AI traffic you see in the screenshots accompanying this review will appear. While I think of it, the only airport with moving docking bridges is Hamburg, which are set up for the Airbus series; Boeings with the exception of the 707 and 727; the MD11; and the MD80/81/83. As long as your chosen FS plane doesn't have the point of view set in an non-standard position (many do), operating the gates is a simple matter of taxiing slowwwwly in with an eye on the sight board, stopping when the lights tell you to and then selecting the appropriate frequency on the Com radios as specified in the relevant section of the manual. Needless to say, addon planes which have the POV set in the wrong place won't dock properly, but then they won't dock correctly in other sceneries either.

I guess I don't really have to say that the standard of all the airports is uniformly high, as the screenshots tell the story better than I can. Berlin-Tegel and Dusseldorf are slightly less complex than I expected based on previous experience of this series, which may be part of Aerosoft's drive to differentiate 'German Airports' from 'Mega Airports', but by contrast, Hamburg and Bremen exceed expectations by a wide margin - and the smaller sceneries are very pleasing indeed, as you can see in the screenshot of Kiel, above on the right there. I would certainly be extremely happy about this package if I had bought it myself, given that the cost works out at under $6 an airport and because the frame rates are consistently high for a scenery of this type. During the review. I flew in and out of the airports using the default 737, the PMDG 737 and the new Wilco 737 PIC and all of them returned acceptable frame rates on a 3.0 Ghz Pentium. This is not to say that there isn't a performance hit - you can't expect to install a complex airport scenery and not experience some kind of slow-down - but the message is that even when I used demanding third party addon airliners frame rates always stayed in double figures.

Aerosoft have a lot of experience in developing and publishing sceneries of this type and as they have shown with Mega Airport Frankfurt, they certainly know how to wring the last ounce of performance out of FS2004. Particularly impressive features of the sceneries include the way the taxiway textures always line up (surprising how many developers can't be bothered to nudge them all into place); the crispness of the textures used throughout the package; and the sheer realism of some of the airfields. Just take a look at Kiel up there - look at it just a little bit squinty-eyed and it could easily be a photo of a real airport. With many of the packages I get to see, the textures break down into a blurry mush when you are still a hundred yards away from the gate and individual objects look like bad cardboard cutouts, yet the scenery still hammers frame rates into the ground. Not so with any of the 'German Airports', which, even if the odd field has been being lopped out of the more generous allocations of old, still sets a standard against which other sceneries can be judged.

Verdict? You can find better sceneries, but not of German airports and not in 'multi-packs' of this size. Aerosoft deliver a full set of printed plates with the package, a refinement that few other publishers care to offer - and when all is said and done, the German Airports series keeps its place in my FS Hall of Fame. GA3 is a fine example of good, solid code, I just wish every package I got to review was like it.