Great Britain & Ireland

By Andrew Herd (3 August 2001)

he artwork describes Great Britain & Ireland as "the largest airport expansion ever" and on face value, an add-on which contains over 280 airports and airfields from the UK and Ireland has to be worth a look. If you read on, Just Flight's publicity leaves little doubt that this is one of the most important packages ever released: "Never before has such a unique and diverse collection of airports been brought together in one incredible package for Flight Simulator 2000!" is one of the more modest statements, and the box abounds with words like "detail," "breathtaking" and "authentic." I took a look behind the hype, and although the package undoubtedly represents good value for money if you want to do a budget makeover of the UK and Ireland, it will disappoint simmers who have installed more detailed products like Gary Summons's UK 2000 series.

The reason for developing products like Great Britain & Ireland is that while FS2000 has around 20,000 airports, "...not all of them are particularly detailed and there's not much to see when you're taking off or landing around the British Isles," to use Just Flight's own words. Simmers who have grown bored with taxiing around endless mud-colored hangars and identical gray terminals will have no problem agreeing with this, I am sure. So the package contains "...over 280 highly detailed renditions of airports located around the British Isles. From international airports like Heathrow, Shannon and Manchester to smaller airports like Biggin Hill and Duxford, right down to local strips such as Kilkenny and Halfpenny Green. Everything in this collection has been carefully researched over 18 months in order to reproduce it at the highest level of detail... There are nearly 800 superbly designed custom 3D objects and over 200 Mb of data has been used to design them." Sounds good. Let's take a look.

The scenery installed faultlessly, taking up about 90 Mb of hard disk space, assuming you go the whole nine yards - there is an option to selectively install 14 of the larger airports. The minimum spec calls for a 450 MHz Pentium, with 64 MB of RAM and an 8 Mb 3D card, and this should run the smaller airports without any trouble, although I would expect significant drops in frame rates landing at the larger ones. The recommended spec is a 700 + MHz Pentium, with 128 MB of RAM and a 32 MB 3D card, which you will need if you plan to use the dynamic scenery, or want to operate from the international airports with the detail sliders maxed out.

One word of warning: if you read the manual, it states that the airports can only be loaded using the "Scenery from FS95 or before" box, which would imply that the scenery isn't fully FS2000 compatible. Normally, reading something like this causes the box to make a short trip from my desk to the bin, but on my system the airports showed up without any problems using the normal scenery selection method. I haven't visited every airfield in the scenery, so it is possible that some may not be appear using the standard selection method.

My first port of call was Teesside Airport, to the Cleveland Flying Club stand, no less, which is normally occupied by a collection of slightly lived-in 150s and 152s, opposite a group of incredibly smart Mercures which the RAF use for mock target practice as they try to sneak in at low level over the grey waves of the North Sea. In the screen shot, I have taxied my PA-28 to the holding point where one would normally ask for clearance. But where are the buildings? In real life you can't actually see the control tower from there, because the enormous hangar which the Mercures live in is in the way. And in front of me, across the runway, I ought to be able to see a collection of burned out hulls used for fire practice, but they are missing too, and so is most of the rest of the airport. Well, OK guys, I appreciate that the more scenery you have the worse the frame rates get, but if I were Just Flight, I think I might be asking my researcher just exactly what he had been doing for all those months. To be fair, all the taxiways are there, which is a huge improvement on the default scenery.

My next stop was Newcastle Airport. Again, I know the place fairly well, having flown from there on numerous occasions. This time, I was more impressed, and although the buildings aren't quite right, they are near enough to give an impression of what the place looks like. The long blast wall behind the main terminal is missing, but then again, I haven't seen a scenery which includes it yet. The Gill Aviation hangars are there on the far side of the field and the dynamic scenery is nothing to complain about either. Once again, the taxiways appear to be complete, although there are a number of static aircraft which are floating above the ground, a problem which is repeated throughout the package. Incidentally, there is another issue with the statics in this package, which is that many of the light aircraft have US registrations, for example the planes at Denham. I really do think that the developer might have put some effort into better localisation.

After Newcastle, I visited St. Just, otherwise known as Land's End. The real airfield merges into the surrounding countryside, but it isn't that difficult to find, firstly because it is on virtually the last piece of England before the ocean begins, and secondly because the peaked roof of the terminal has the words "Land's End" painted all over it in enormous letters, just in case you have any doubts about your position. I guess the building behind the PA-28 is meant to be the terminal, but as you can see I doubt very much that the designer has ever seen a picture of the place or he wouldn't have given it a flat roof. And no, it doesn't have "Land's End" painted on it - I looked.

OK, I guess by now you have got the message. Though I disagree with much of the hyperbole on the box, it has to be said that I developed a certain affection for the scenery after using it for a few days. For £25 it absolutely transforms the vast majority of the airports in Great Britain and Ireland, and if the smaller fields aren't particularly accurate, at least they no longer look as awful as the defaults. One of the highlights of the package is the trees, which are macro generated instead of the usual billboard or cruciform objects which litter otherwise excellent sceneries - this is the first scenery I have seen which takes advantage of this long neglected feature of Flight Simulator and the Ivanhoe Group, who developed it, are to be congratulated on their initiative.

The manual highlights Easter eggs like the London Eye, the ill-fated Millennium Dome, Dublin Castle and the monorail at Stansted and they are all there, as well as other goodies like rotating radars, passenger piers, lighting towers, runway signs and portacabins. But it has to be faced that while there are nearly 800 custom 3D objects, when you spread them around 280-odd airports, you are going to get a certain amount of repetition; not as much as in the default scenery, of course, but you do get that feeling of deja vu now and again.

Without a doubt, Great Britain & Ireland is an incredibly ambitious project. And as long as you know what to expect, it shouldn't disappoint - it is just that if you take what it says on the box literally, you might believe that every airport is going to be recreated in exacting detail, and that clearly isn't so. While the large airports aren't half bad, with custom tiles and and even working docking guidance systems, the vast majority would be better billed as enhancements to the FS2000 scenery than as authentic replacements. If you take Great Britain & Ireland at this level, it is great value for money.

Who should buy this package? If you want a new look for the UK and Ireland at the best possible price, then Great Britain & Ireland has no competition whatsoever. If, on the other hand, you want the greatest realism possible, you will have to wait until Gary Summons to complete his mammoth UK2000 scenery, which won't cover Ireland and is unlikely to be finished until after FS2002 hits the shelves. Or, just maybe, for Ivanhoe to issue an upgrade to Great Britain & Ireland...