SimFlyers Atlanta International Scenery

By David Jordan (30 June 2004)

But first things first, how's the installation? As is the norm for commercial flight simulator products these days, pretty easy - run the program, insert your (ludicrously long: about 700 characters) key, select Flight Simulator 2004 and press install.

The manual says that you should start and restart flight simulator before you do this but I didn't bother as I could think of no reason to do that, and it still worked fine for me. A tool is installed along with the scenery to decide what areas of scenery to display, and recklessly I turned them all on. Load up flightsim, choose a gate or runway from the add-on scenery and you're in.

   

I have never been to Atlanta, (indeed I have only been to America twice) but it initially does strike me as a rather boring airport (but initial impressions are often wrong...). There are four long runways and at least forty taxiways - imagine what chaos an airport designer in another country could cause with that! Atlanta has four parallel runways, two on either side of the the main terminal. Said terminal is at the very western end of the airport, and there are five concourses spreading themselves eastwards, or at least that's what I counted on the map. The excellent 15 page manual that comes with the scenery says that there are six. The manual doesn't tell you how many gates there are, so I'm just going to pick a number at random and say 500 (I'm not going to try to count them if I can't count to six!). Either way, in flight simulator Simflyers have made Atlanta an exciting airport, purely by recreating it with immense realism.

   

What I like best about this scenery, curiously enough, are the PAPI lights - I have never seen a scenery that actually has "light-holder-things" to hold the PAPI rather than just having four lights floating there in space. Equally stirring, although you have to do a ludicrously low approach to fully appreciate it, is the

Simflyers' scenery includes lots of little details such as these stop signs.

'forest' on approach. Unfortunately, the runway approach lights don't sit on top of the 'trees', so it's actually appreciated better in the day time. You could look out of your window to read the advertising banners on your left instead, I suppose. A shame, but I would imagine this is due to the same FS2004 limitations that mean we have to have flat airports. Every taxiway marking light has a stand too.

All taxi markings are there, as are little roads for service vehicles (although I didn't actually see any of them moving, unlike Heathrow Pro which I will be reviewing at a later date) - they even have stop signs to remind the drivers that they are about to be crushed under 200 tons of Boeing-branded steel.

There is also Simflyers' trademark "serviceArmada" and gate feature, where by you tune a nav and com frequency and immediately (there doesn't appear to be any animation) the gate has moved to your front door and you are surrounded by said armada. Tune another frequency and you'll even be refuelled for your return flight to wherever.

       
Tune the radio to the right frequency, and Simflyers' trademark "serviceArmada" surrounds your plane

If this review has whetted your appetite, be warned that all of this comes at a cost - frame rates. I would seriously suggest that you install the demo first, be shocked at how everything turns into a slideshow, but taxi around for an hour and see how you feel then. If your computer is up to it, you'll surely enjoy the great detail found in Simflyers' Atlanta scenery.

David Jordan
davidjordan@talk21.com

www.simflyers.net