Aerosoft Mega Airport Frankfurt

By Andrew Herd (4 April 2006)

tatistics come, as the man said, below lies and damned lies, but whatever form of reckoning you choose, Germany's Frankfurt-Main is one of the world's busiest airports. Depending on who you wish to believe, last year the place ranked eighth in the world in terms of passenger traffic; third as far international passenger numbers were concerned; fourteenth when traffic movements were counted; and it is without a doubt the largest airport in Germany. The figures create a picture of a complex hub hosting a high percentage of long haul flights to account for how all those passengers end up being split among relatively few flights and sure enough Franfurt proves to be a major jumping off point for destinations all over the globe.

It wasn't always that way. Like so many European airfields, Frankfurt had its origins in the build up to the First World War, on a site some distance from the present location. The Versaille Treaty led to the field being abandoned to all intents and purposes, after most of the aircraft and the hangar that housed them had been destroyed. A few years later, the beginnings of a new airfield were made on the present site and the first stirrings of civil aviation began, only to be displaced again by the Luftwaffe in the thirties, who in turn had to make way for the USAF in 1945. Post-war the return to civilian traffic was faster and the first commercial flights began in 1946.

Then came the Berlin Airlift, which lasted from June 24th 1948 to May 5th 1949, during which time the airport served as one end of the lifeline on which the survival of West Berlin depended. Nearly 280,000 flights were made during the airlift, many of them by service crews who found themselves facing the parodox of flying their butts off to save a city they had recently been been attempting to destroy. My late father-in-law was among them and I recall him telling me that more than once he got so tired that he had to ask his navigator which airport they were at before taxiing the plane out. The southern side of the airport was known as Rhein-Main airbase - the USAF used it until 2005 when work began to build an A380 maintenance facility there and this side of the field also hosts a general aviation terminal.

The modern Frankfurt has twin 13,000 foot east-west runways and a single north-south one mated to a complex system of taxiways serving two passenger and two cargo terminals. Terminal 1 opened in 1972, marking the beginning of Frankfurt's claim to be a major international hub and although Lufthansa remains the major user, nearly a hundred airlines operate from it, serving destinations as diverse as Bishkek to LAX. Terminal 2 opened in '94 and resembles a railway station with its tall glass facade. Although the 60+ airlines which dock at the second terminal mainly serve European destinations, there are flights as far afield as Halifax and Hong Kong. Road and rail connections out of the airport are excellent and the scenery makes quite a feature of them.

Mega Airport Frankfurt comes in one of Aerosoft's familiar cardboard boxes, the contents of which included a CD, a German/English manual and a set of plates. The CD proclaimed itself to be version 3 of the scenery and I reviewed it with service pack 1 installed, which is available from the support section of Aerosoft's site - this is only a 1.6 Mb download and it fixes some flickering taxiway problems and an uninstall bugette. According to the manual, minimum hardware requirements are a 2.6 Gb Pentium or better, 120 Mb hard disk space, at least 512 Mb of RAM and a 128 Mb graphics card - the developers recommend 1024 Mb of RAM and a 256 Mb graphics card. Installation couldn't be much easier and is triggered by sticking the CD-ROM in the drive; just about the only user interaction required being to enter the serial number and to choose whether to have static aircraft installed or not. Unfortunately, due to a bugette, the static planes seem to install anyway, the cure being to launch the supplied AI Traffic Tool after installation and select the statics 'off' which will remove them. Failure to do this will lead to AI planes parking on the same stands as the statics at times, which can lead to siamesed planes and other interesting phenomena. Beyond an AFCAD file (which tells the FS2004 AI where the stands and taxiways are, among other things), no AI files are included and the developers recommend using an AI setting of 25% at most.

The scenery was developed by the 'German Airports' team, who should be well known to FlightSim.Com regulars, having produced some of the best airport sceneries around over the past few years. A less ambitious version of Frankfurt used to be available as part of their German Airports 2 package, which is currently being upgraded for re-release (apparently minus Frankfurt), but the scenery featured in this review has been completely recoded in Gmax and by gosh, it shows - what was once good is now excellent.

Loading up the airport for the first time was quite a culture shock. I used the default 737 with Dan Bourque's British Airways 'World Tails' repaints (BA734WT1.ZIP) which accounts for why you can see Chelsea Rose up there in the line of Lufthansa blue. The first thing that old hands can do is forget the old 'German Airports' Frankfurt, because any similarity between it and this package is purely coincidental - the old airport was very fine, but the Mega Airport is breathtaking, with gorgeous buildings, superb animations and an air of reality that very few FS sceneries manage to catch. There is a downside to this, of course, which is that even with pretty chunky hardware, frame rates will occasionally dip to the low teens as you taxi past the terminals with all the display options maxed out - but, if you are sensible about the percentage of AI traffic and choose a relatively frame-rate friendly package like MyTraffic, rates are much better than you would expect for a scenery of this size. I was astonished to see rates averaging 20 fps even with the AI set to 66% on a 3.2 Ghz Pentium with 4 Gb of RAM - quite clearly, some very, very clever programming has gone on here.

First impressions are of legions of support vehicles scurrying around a vast and intricate complex, the animation extending right out onto the nearby Highway 5, which passes close to the airport. According to the manual, you can see 60 dynamic vehicles on the aprons and up to 450 on the highway in addition to the AI planes, but cunning scheduling by the developers means that the impression is of many more vehicles around the airport than there actually are - as if 60 wasn't enough to begin with. All this activity can lead to occasional problems, because FS AI isn't smart enough to stop itself pushing back into the path of taxiing planes and given the number of gates, conflicts occur even at the recommended 25% AI level - and that is leaving aside 'collisions' with the dynamic vehicles, but this is an FS2004 coding limitation rather than being anything to do with the scenery itself. There is activity everywhere you look on the hardstandings and there is also a working fast transit rail system which shuttles back and forth, plus animated smoke. What you don't get are any operating airgates, a feature which has caused howls of outrage in some quarters, though personally, I can take or leave animated docking systems, particularly if their absence contributes to frame rates as good as the ones this scenery delivers.

The buildings are all extremely believable, with a very high polygon count and textures that look great until they are right in your face - the only better texture sets I have seen have been in the GeoRender sceneries, which are built on a much smaller scale, allowing the developer more scope to concentrate on quality. Quite how the Frankfurt developers managed to maintain such a high standard across such a vast scenery is beyond me, but their work has paid off in making the airport one of the most believable FS environments I have ever encountered. This attention to detail extends from the places you would expect to find it, like the air stairs and blast walls, to the ground vehicles, which are in a class of their own as far as dynamic scenery goes - you actually have to tailgate the trucks before their textures begin to pixellate. It is difficult to stress how much this enhances the addon, as the vast majority of sceneries use vehicles which look acceptable in the distance, but break down into a mess of blurry textures and boxy coachwork as soon as they are near enough to get noticed.

The airport includes custom ground textures which replace Microsoft's familiar 'airport green' with seasonally changing photorealistic substitutes. This must have taken some time to get right, but the results are well worth it, because the runways and taxiways actually look as if they belong there, as opposed to having been slapped down on top of an ill-matching default landscape. Having seasonal textures is quite a plus, because the airport eases itself nicely into its surroundings in winter, rather than standing out in sore thumb mode as so many FS addon airports do. You get full night lighting effects, the runway and taxiway textures are excellent and I didn't spot any bad joins - according to the manual there are well over a thousand taxiway and runway signs and these are skinned to a similarly high standard. Many of the gates are fitted with working AGNIS automatic docking systems, although of course none of the gates are animated.

The scenery extends way off-airport to include the autobahn that I have already mentioned, and it also includes a selection of buildings in the city of Frankfurt, which makes the airport easier to find if you are doing a VFR approach. The developers also appear to have improved on the landclassing around the airport; there are many new lakes and such areas of water as FS2004 includes have had their shorelines edited; the road network has been considerably upgraded for miles in every direction; as has the railroad system, which is very extensive in this region; and even the rivers have had a much-needed makeover. When all is taken into account, the scope of the scenery goes beyond any sensible criticism I could make of it, as not only does EDDF look as real as any airport I have seen to date in Flight Simulator, the upgrade to the surrounding terrain makes approaches and departures feel real too.

There are a few features to beware of, though. It may well be a video card driver issue (ATI for what it is worth), but the airport ground textures periodically developed a case of 'marching ants', a phenomenon which seems to be caused by mip mapping and results in middle ground textures being overlaid by dozens of flickering dotted lines. The problem isn't unique to this scenery and I have seen it many times before, although not so extensively - it annoys some folk, but in practice you get used to it after a while. I also experienced some momentary hesitations, particularly on easterly departures and when I was viewing the airport in spot plane view over the city of Frankfurt. One other issue-ette is that if you are flying past the airport, looking away from it, and then switch view to look towards the runways, the ground textures take a second to roll over the defaults, but apart from that, there isn't anything to report.

Mega Airport Frankfurt is an ambitious package that can truly claim to be 'immersive' thanks to all those dynamic scenery vehicles buzzing around and the standard-setting quality of the buildings and textures. Frame rates are good, but you will need a fast system to get the best out of this addon - that being said, there are plenty of simmers out there with loaded PCs and if you want to give yourself a real treat to start 2006, this is it, my friend.