VFR Scenery Germany 1 / German Airports 4

By Andrew Herd (27 August 2004)

cenery Germany 1 is an ambitious attempt to provide a complete 'VFR' environment for three German states, with every major road, river, valley, town and forest placed accurately enough so that it is possible to navigate with the aid of a chart, rather than resorting to the GPS, VOR radials and pot luck on which simmers traditionally rely to find their way about.

You might wonder why, in this day and age, charts are necessary at all, given the widespread availability of electronic aids to navigation, but the aircraft in Flight Simulator are equipped to a standard way beyond anything you are likely to find in most privately owned planes. A substantial proportion of GA singles lack any navigational equipment at all, beyond a clock and the DI; and though planes with a single VOR aren't that uncommon, the twin units you find in most FS panels are rarely seen in real life. The reason is cost - the KX155a nav/coms we take for granted in the sim cost over $3000 each and even the humble KI208 VOR/LOC indicator is over a grand a pop.

So I am always interested when an FS software house releases a product which allows visual navigation, because it is one of the big missing pieces in the jigsaw that makes up flight simulation. If your aim in using FS is to recreate the nearest possible simulation of GA flight, then navigating using the mark one eyeball - and the attendant risk of getting lost - ought to be part of it. But first, it might be worth explaining a little bit about the terms involved.

The vast majority of GA flights take place under what is known as VFR (visual flight rules) conditions, a much abused term which means anything a pilot wants it to mean until something goes wrong and the aviation authorities get involved. Although the precise definition of VFR varies from one jurisdiction to another, there are three commonly held rules: an aircraft must be clear of clouds; in sight of the ground; and outside certain types of controlled airspace. Dealing with each condition in turn, it is surprising how little forward visibility is required to be VFR - in the UK, if you are flying a fixed wing aircraft at less than 140 knots, you are VFR until the forward vis drops below 1500 meters, which is under one nautical mile. When the vis drops that low, there is a nightmarish feeling of flying in a fishbowl and visual navigation becomes almost impossible, unless you are following a line feature - hence most aviators' understanding of IFR (instrument flight rules) being that it means 'I Follow Roads'. Progression from 1500 meter visibility to complete loss of the horizon can not only be alarmingly swift, but surprisingly hard to detect - one moment you are VFR, the next, you are IFR and doing a 180 may not be enough to get you out, given that conditions can deteriorate simultaneously over a wide area.

The definition of a VFR helicopter flight is that it must take place in 'reasonable visibility', which one air ambulance pilot I know apparently interprets as being able to see the end of the blades, but then I guess every field is a potential landing pad for a chopper. Being in sight of the ground has always seemed a reasonable rule to me; if you can't see terra firma and the aircraft isn't suitably equipped, how do you think you are going to navigate? Finally, every country has exclusions forbidding VFR flight in airways and in the highest levels of controlled airspace, which is fair enough, because that is where the big boys play. What many simmers may not be aware of is that most real pilots must fly VFR, because their licenses do not allow flight in instrument meteorologic conditions, and furthermore, circumstances can occur in which a pilot is qualified to fly IFR, but finds himself in a plane which is not, due to lack of instrumentation or non-FM immune radios. The result is that at a rough estimate, something like 98% of GA flights take place under VFR condtions.

There have been many attempts to provide sceneries which allow visual navigation in Flight Simulator, not least Austria Pro for FS98 and the VFR Photographic Scenery for England and Wales but they have all had their limitations (for example, the England and Wales scenery loses seasonal behavior, which VFR Scenery Germany does not, thanks to its different approach). The trouble is that Flight Simulator only discovered an interest in the ground relatively late in its life and it still hasn't quite got its head around what it ought to do with it. It may be the immaturity of this part of the sim, but earthbound detail seems to soak up more than its fair share of processor time and although Flight Simulator displays ground textures, it isn't at all happy if it is faced with too much variety. Next time you fire FS up, take off, climb to a couple of thousand feet, clear the panel and concentrate on the ground immediately in front of you - after a few seconds you will begin to discern a strange computer driven dance as the textures shuffle into place, often at the very last minute and just before the plane overflies them. This shuffling is the Achilles heel of visual navigation addons, because they have either to use widespread 'landclassing' (specifying which type of FS scenery tile will be displayed where) in order to recreate the pattern of towns and forests on the map; or they have to use custom textures tied to specific geographical coordinates, as the British VFR Photo Scenery does. Both these approaches make shuffling worse - the latter package is prone to texture blurring makes the ground look like a kid's finger painting at times - and then the textures shuffle and the blurring vanishes as if it had never been. So I was seriously interested to see if the VFR Scenery Germany authors had got around this trying problem.

The package is available as a boxed CD for 39.95 euros, which is about $43 and it covers the south-west of the country. Scenery Germany 2 will cover the north-west and there is presumably more to come. Hardware requirements are an 800 MHz Pentium or above, running Windows 98 or better, FS2002 or FS2004, 256 Mb of RAM and 500 Mb of hard disk space. Installation is automatic after insertion of the CD, apart from offering a choice of which version of FS you want to install the package into, if you have both on your disk. There is a registration code to enter and you also have the opportunity not to install the landclass files, which would leave the landscape decorated with Microsoft's default towns and forests, which are mostly distinguished by being in the wrong place. There is also a 1.4 Mb patch which takes the scenery up to version 3.1.

I reviewed the package in FS2004 and so comments apply to that version. The first change every user will notice is an increase in FS loading times, which are at least doubled as all the extra ground features are loaded. Apart from accurate outlines of ground features, the addon includes a very nice new mesh and a slew of new airfields, the number of which varies from 53 according to the manual, to 61 on Aerosoft's web site, so you can take your pick. Whichever number is correct, there are plenty of 'em. Just about every obstacle to navigation shown on the ICAO sectionals is modelled - the mast in the screenshot above is a good example, but there are also pylons, power stations and castles. All the major rivers have been re-routed along their correct paths, ships sail on them, and Lake Constance has regained its missing island. As if that wasn't enough, you get no less than three German/English manuals: one covering the installation; one which introduces the area and gives details of several sight-seeing flights; and one containing airfield charts - note that there are no approach plates because these are mostly small fields. What you do not get are any charts to navigate by, but they aren't too difficult to obtain and most flying outfitters should be able to source them if you explain which area you are after.

By comparison to a default FS2004 installation, the addon transforms the scenery, chiefly by virtue of the new landclasses, which break Microsoft's rather monotonous alternation of town and field into a much more authentic central European patchwork. Parts of this area lie in Germany's industrial heartland, where the towns are piled in on top of each other in the most claustrophobic fashion - a feature which the addon recreates especially well. The next improvement to strike the eye is the sprinkling of new masts, every aviator's nightmare. I once recall doing a practiced forced landing, which seemed well planned until I opened the throttle and found myself looking up at a windfarm which had materialised from nowhere.

Okay, I hear you say, but under normal circumstances, who would be flying that low? Well, that is one of the places where reality and simulation diverge and although one of the great joys of flight simulation is being able to behave as if controlled airspace doesn't exist, I would contend that there isn't so much point buying a package like this if you don't use it to fly the way real planes must. I have no intention of dictating how you ought to use the sim, but a television mast 4000 feet below your flight path doesn't pose quite the same level of threat as one that might pop up in your face any second; and visual navigation is fun. Or at least I think it is.

To quote a real life example, if I fly into Manchester Barton in the UK (EGCB) from the north, I have to circumnavigate Leeds-Bradford's airspace before being forced down to under 3500 feet by the Manchester TMA, which overlies ground rising to 1300 feet above sea level in places. Allowing a 500 foot safety margin below the floor of the airspace, that means flying at around 3000 feet above sea level, which means I must identify a mast to the north-east of Bolton, the top of which is at 2500 feet. Just supposing the cloud base forces me down a little further and vis drops to a couple of nautical miles - still VFR - if I am cruising at 120 knots, I have precisely one minute to spot that mast before I hit it. Though I don't have the relevant German sectionals, I am prepared to bet that there are places in this scenery where similar situations occur - and that is leaving aside fields with obstructed approaches like Bas Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, shown in the shot above. Incidentally, this is a 'real weather' shot, showing fairly typical high pressure vis of 16 km, which is just under 9 nautical miles; FS2004 simulates the filthy horizons you get in such conditions extremely well.

Having introduced the fields, this is a good place to talk about them.Trier Fohren (EDRT) shown here is a good example, although it has one of the longest runways of all at 1200 meters. We are mainly talking small fields with grass runways in the 700 - 800 meter range, though some are considerably shorter and a few only just scrape in over the 400 meter mark. As a consequence, heavy metal simmers need not apply and the Cessna 441 I was testing had limited opportunites to land, though it was entertaining trying. We are talking of 172/182, Aeronca and Cub-class territory, though smaller twins like the Flight1 310 could be shoehorned in and the addon provides many happy hunting grounds for STOL planes like the FSD Porter. I have flown on a lot of grass in my time and prefer the informal atmosphere that goes with it to the yellow jacketed discipline of paved fields.

There are plenty of custom buildings and as you can see, considerable trouble has been taken to make the airfields look good and although they are nowhere as detailed as singles like the Lago GeoRender packages, they pleased me. One problem you will notice is that the plane won't always load correctly on the threshold and needs a small slew to get it properly lined up. I also came across a couple of fields with semi-transparent ground textures on my travels, but no major bugs.

Frame rates? Generally good and usable all the time on my 3.0 Ghz system, though there was some hesitation and worrying dips at times. The manuals suffer from the usual Aerosoft problem of not being tightly enough edited and are full of minor mistakes and references to previous versions, but on the whole they offer good advice on how to make the addon perform as smoothly as possible. Read this section! The bad news is that the package does suffer from attacks of blurring, particularly if you cruise faster than 100 knots and make frequent turns. There are various partial solutions on offer: you can limit the visibility to 10 nm, which sounds drastic, but duplicates what happens in a European summer very well (vis is frequently much less than that); you can turn extended terrain textures off, which limits the blurring near you at the expense of making it much worse in the distance; or if your system is fast enought to stand it, you can increase TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS up to 16, 20, or even more, which has the beneficial effect of making FS2004 concentrate more of its time on getting the ground textures sorted out.

Unaccountably, blurring isn't a problem on some setups and I don't have a good explanation of why this should be. However, it is common enough and both my systems suffer from it with this scenery loaded. It is as much a problem in FS2002 as it is in FS2004 and I would love to see some attention devoted to this area in the next version of Flight Simulator, as an overhaul of the way ground textures load is long overdue.

Scenery Germany 1 also improves the appearance of the major rivers, such as the Rhine, seen here near Herrenteich (EDEH). I am using Bill Lyon's freeware water textures, which accounts for why the water looks different, but the rivers look good even if you use the FS default textures. One slight problem is that the 'new' river textures are laid on top of the ground textures and the edge between water and land looks as if it has been cut with a razor; an effect which is apparent even at 5000 feet; however, this is outweighed by the fact that the rivers all have the correct width and outline, instead of being insignificant little ditches cut across the landscape.

An issue for users who buy just one package in the series is that the rivers mostly run diagonally across it, with the inevitable result that if you follow one (remember to keep it on your left!) you won't have to fly too long before there is a sudden transition back to the way things are in the default scenery, but rectifying problems like that is way beyond the scope of the package. It would make such a difference to Flight Simulator if Microsoft could give the bigger rivers and lakes a more detailed treatment than they have at present - they are such useful navigational features and in the real world I have lost count of the number of times a distinctively shaped loop in a watercourse has made me certain of my position.

One of the most interesting features of the package is that the developer has implemented sloping runways at three small fields. This feature is not available in FS2000, according to the manual. In FS2004, it had me spellbound. Whatever I did, I could not get the Microsoft Cub to take off from any of the sloped strips - it just groundlooped and crashed and I am dying to find out why. The RealAir Decathlon could be flown out (which proves that the problem isn't with taildraggers in general) and the 172 could also be taken off as long as I didn't feed in the power all at once. I gotta say that the approaches to these three strips are among the most real ones I have ever made in a simulator, thanks to the irregularities in the landing area. Flight Simulator would make you think that all strips are perfectly flat, but they aren't, even paved ones can have interesting ripples in them, especially if they were laid in a hurry during wartime.

So that is VFR Scenery Germany 1, which despite a few drawbacks inherent to addons of this type, is a good effort that makes me look forward to seeing the rest of the series. There is so much packed into it that every time I fly in the area, I find something new and poor old Nels has had to put up with several re-edits of this review because of it! In the same package I received the FS2004 version of Aerosoft's German Airports 4, which although from a different part of Germany, will eventually complement the completed VFR Scenery set, as the two are compatible.

German Airports 4 for FS2004

The German Airports sceneries should need little introduction, because they are one of the longest running developments in FS history. The first installment of the series was released for FS98 and Aerosoft have faithfully stuck with it ever since, issuing patches and upgrades as required, until I can't imagine my FS setup being complete without them. I last reviewed GA4 a year ago and really liked it at the time and the new version is everything the old one was, with the added bonus of a sheaf of approach plates. Everything I said in the review of the last version still stands, so if you aren't familiar with the addon, you can read about it here. If anything, the package looks slightly better in FS2004 than it did in FS2002, thanks to the enhanced feature set in the new version of the sim.

There are ten airports: Berlin-Templehof, Berlin Schonefeld, Braunschweig, Westerland-Sylt, Maastrict-Aachen, Schwerin-Parchim, Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden, Magdeburg, Saarbrucken and Frankfurt-Hahn, so no change from the previous version. A patch to version 3.2 is already available on the Aerosoft website, which corrects the AI traffic, but inevitably a few bugs have crept into the new version and I experienced some problems with flashing textures in spot plane view. I would expect the developers to fix this, as they have always done so in the past.

Fans of the series might note that German Airports 1 has already been upgraded to full FS2004 compliance and that GA2 and 3 are in the pipeline, so watch this space.

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