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The package is an easy download at only 44 Mb and installed very easily, after I had entered the copy protection key code emailed to me at the time of purchase. At the end of the installation, a check of the Start Menu showed a new Aerosoft\Helgoland X program group containing links to a couple of 17 page pdfs in English and German and a folder which allows you to activate and deactivate the 'special effects'. Just to get this out of the way - activating the effects runs an app that turns on animated beacons and lighthouse effects, which eat frames, so beware! System requirements are given as a 2.0 Ghz Pentium with 512 Mb of RAM (1 Gb strongly advised); 150 Mb of hard disk space; FSX; any version of Windows from 98SE up to Vista, including 2000; and a sound card. I did the review using FSX SP2 on a 2.66 Ghz Core2Duo with 4 Gb of RAM, a 768 Mb GeForce 8800 GTX and Windows Vista and would respectfully add that running sophisticated addons on FSX on anything less than a 3.0 Ghz system and preferably a dual core system is unlikely to be rewarding, but hey, what do I know? The manual is worth a read, because it gives some useful hints about how to get the best from the scenery. In particular, you are advised to set 'global texture resolution' to 'very high'; the scenery tab 'texture resolution' to one meter; and the two water traffic settings to at least 50% and preferably 100%. Two missions are included with the product, both of which are entertaining: the first is a flight around the island in a Cessna 172, with realistic ATC; the second is a flight out to an oil rig in the Bell, in deteriorating weather. And yep, the oil rig is included.
Helgoland Dune is one of the most interesting airports you could imagine. You would think that given it is on a low-lying island, it shouldn't pose much of a problem, but think again - despite being only six feet above sea level with its threshold on the beach, 21 manages to have an obstructed approach, thanks to a badly-placed sand dune. For some reason, Aerosoft's manual doesn't give the lengths, but they are: 15/33 438 yards; 03/21 406 yards; 06/24 282 yards (600 yards looks short in a light aircraft) and they are restricted to 12500 pound aircraft and 22000 pound choppers. Then throw in the fact that although the islands have a maritime climate, they have little protection from offshore winds and your cargo of day trippers looking forward to enjoying the tax exemptions Helgoland has to offer may have second thoughts as you crab in with the runway at thirty degrees to your heading; just try this place with real weather enabled. Better yet, buy German Airfields 1 and you can make people throw up their breakfast all the way down the coast. The SAR base on Helgoland itself provides rather less excitement, although it was clearly designed by someone who had no idea about the kinds of stuff FS helicopters are capable of getting up to if left to their own devices, and finally, as I mentioned above, you get Germany's only oil rig, which is located a little further up the coast. The back of the manual is devoted to charts designed and provided by Aerosoft, which show circuit direction and runway headings and the frequency of the VOR (in bad weather, you will bless whoever put it there). Just before that are two pages of FAQs, which, much as I like this product, are going to have to be dealt with. I admire Aerosoft for their honesty in pointing the major problem with this product out, which is that if you load a flight in FSX with the plane on the runway, it is almost certain to appear below the ground - much the same happens if you try to start a flight on the rig. The reason for this is bound up with the way the developers have implemented the terrain and it also accounts for why the islands don't appear in the FSX map view and the solution is to turn off aircraft damage, slew the plane to above ground level, before turning off slewing and let it drop onto its wheels; not pretty, but it works. I can't say that this bothered me too much and if it is due to an FSX limitation, then there isn't much Aerosoft can do about it, but it will annoy some simmers to death, so don't say you weren't warned! On the other hand, if you fly into Helgoland, the runways behave perfectly normally, although they look much better.
And boy, do they look better. The best description of this addon is 'small, but perfectly formed' and once you have used it a couple of times, you will want more, ground level problems or no. For a start, the quality of the ground textures is to die for and the islands look absolutely real from the virtual air. Go one stage further and fly the Aerosoft Dornier 27 for FSX (yeah, I know I keep plugging it, but it is outstanding) and apart from the fact that your passengers aren't sicking up all over the cockpit, it can be hard to tell that you aren't there in real life. The Dornier is a good choice of plane to operate out of there, because it is designed for the job and makes those short runways look long, but if you are stuck with the default planes I would suggest the Maule to begin with as it gives you a fair margin for error. As it happens, there is a BN Islander for FS2004 by Marcel Kuhnt (DIAAI32G.ZIP) with a German registration, though whether it works OK in FSX I cannot say, but with any luck the appearance of this scenery will inspire Marcel to update it for FSX, because it would be the perfect match. As you can see from the screenshots, both Dune and Helgoland look superb and the standard of the rest of the scenery is just as good as the textures. The airport buildings aren't quite up to the standard of Richard Goldstein's GeoRender series, but that doesn't appear to have made it into FSX format yet, unless I have missed something (Richard?), so I can truthfully say that the Helgoland addon is as good as anything I have seen for FSX, with crisp textures and very believable buildings. I did occasionally see odd dark stripes in the scenery, but the FAQ explains this as being caused by the photographic texture tiles loading in reverse order - bad FSX - and there isn't much can be done about it. Again, the standard of the phototextures is so high and the overall standard of the scenery is so good that it didn't bother me. 
So what we have here is a very nice scenery that provides challenging fixed wing approaches and has a couple of chopper pads thrown in. The SAR base is easy enough to land at, but the rig is a different matter, given that the pad is small and there is a big flare head to crash into, so get practicing. Just about the only disappointment is the calm seas that prevail in FSX and I would love to see an addon that allowed you to alter the sea state and provide believable storms! Why the Silver AAA given the problem with aircraft sinking into the runway? Do me a favor and look at the screenshots - I am a sucker for these very high quality photosceneries because they just look so... well, real. As I remarked earlier, if you buy Aerosoft's German Airfields 1 for FSX with Helgoland, you can island hop all the way down this part of the coast, flying over one meter resolution phototextured scenery - need I say any more?
Andrew Herd  Copyright © 2008 by FlightSim.Com. All Rights Reserved. |
elgoland is one of those places that has managed to gather a great deal of history around it without drawing much attention to itself. The island lies in the German Bight of the North Sea, forty miles offshore to the northwest of Cuxhaven. The total area of the main island is only just over 500 acres, most of it on a level plateau protected by sandstone cliffs (known as the Oberland), with a smaller, lower-lying and partly reclaimed area to the southeast being known as the Unterland. Just to the east is a smaller, sandy island called Dune. Dune and Helgoland were part of a single island as recently as 800 AD, but rising sea levels had reduced what used to be a 120 mile periphery to a mere 8 miles by 1650.
