SimFlyers Manchester Airport

By Andrew Herd (1 July 2001)

SimFlyers should already be well-known to FlightSim.Com members for their Philadelphia, which was given rave reviews recently. Now they have done it again with Britain's Manchester airport.

Manchester is one of the busiest airports in the UK, handling upwards of 20 million passengers a year at present, with passenger growth expected to double by 2017. At present there are two runways and three terminals, a far cry from the thirties when Imperial Airways only operated three flights a week from Barton, the old airport. The first runway at the present site was completed in 1938 and just over a year's operation was completed before the airport was turned over to aircraft production and parachute training. Commercial aviation resumed in 1946 with an Air France Dakota flight to Le Bourget, and from that moment onwards, Manchester expanded steadily.

The scenery shows Manchester International Airport (EGCC) as it is today, and includes realistic buildings and objects with full night and seasonal texturing. In addition there is an active docking system at most of the gates, and a comprehensive package of static and dynamic aircraft is available.

The main package is a 3.33 Mb download (SF-EGCC.ZIP) and unzipping it produces an executable which can either be installed as a demo version which is missing many textures; or as a complete registered version, providing you have paid for and been emailed the key. Everything installed perfectly on my system and a beginner should be able to setup the scenery without any trouble as long as he or she understands how to download a zip file.

Dynamic (SF-EGCCD.ZIP) and static (SF-EGCCS.ZIP) are available as smaller freeware downloads and while these will work with the default Microsoft scenery, the aircraft don't always align with the runway and much taxiing occurs on the grass. When used with SimFlyers Manchester, the dynamics and statics add immensely to the enjoyment of the scenery - something is happening all of the time, whether it is aircraft landing, taxiing, or taking off, or cars, buses, tankers and service vehicles buzzing around the airport. The only other scenery I can think of which provides a similar level of enjoyment is Lago's magnificent Italy 2000.

The runways and taxiways include all the markings and signs one would expect, with realistic night lighting. I had some problems with "lights in the sky" at times, but I am almost completely certain that this was due to my graphics card and in any event it wasn't obtrusive. On the whole the textures are very good, with custom runway tiles ensuring that landings feel as real as possible. The taxiway centerlines are well executed and I could find very few of the bad joins which mar so many otherwise excellent sceneries. The textures on the buildings are particularly crisp, as the screen shots demonstrate and this is one of the things that makes the scenery so pleasant to use.

The stands are very detailed and the vacant ones include Safegate docking systems which work very much like the real thing, although none of the gates I tested appeared to be animated. This is one of the few disappointments with the scenery, but the developers tell me that it will be fixed in a later patch. By way of compensation, there are so many minor details like baggage trains and remote stands to see that it would take a long while to get bored with this airport..

Apart from a brief installation file, the documentation only extends to a four page pdf, which includes an airport map and background information about Manchester present and past, but little detail about the operation of the scenery itself. To be fair, the only part of the scenery which merits any description is the operation of the docking systems and that is fairly self-evident, but it would have been good to see some advice about maintaining frame rates on less well specified systems. There aren't any approach plates, but these can be downloaded for free from the UK National Air Traffic service.

With such a detailed scenery, it is inevitable that frame rates take a hammering. I tested the scenery on a 1.7 GHz Pentium IV with a GeForce 3 and at times I was down to 15 fps with all the sliders maxed and the dynamic scenery loaded. Turning terrain detail distance down to 25 and pulling back the dynamic scenery sliders made it perfectly usable on a 733 MHz machine. SimFlyers have done their best to save frames, with the result that there are some disconcerting "pop-up" effects, where static aircraft and hedges appear from nowhere, but once again, this kind of thing is easy to forgive. Very few airports have ever been done in this level of detail - I only wish that they hadn't put in such realistic approach lighting - I was so fascinated the first time I saw it that I forgot what I was doing, sank below the glideslope and hit it with my gear.

I truly enjoyed using this scenery and it will definitely stay on my hard disk. Sure, it is more expensive than the run-of-the-mill commercial packages we are used to seeing, but the level of attention to detail lifts it clear of the pack and I can recommend it. In fact, I liked it so much I am just going to have to have a look at their Philadelphia package.