FlightSim.Com Reviews: Microsoft New York

Microsoft New York

by Nels Anderson

icrosoft New York is one of the first scenery add-ons available for use with Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS5). The scenery is primarily synthetic, like much of the other scenery available from Microsoft. However, there is a photo-realistic overlay of the central city area that is visible under some circumstances.

What's Included?

The name and the box cover pretty much give it away--this scenery package concentrates on the New York City area. You wouldn't think that a single city would provide much flying, but the New York metro area is very large and there is a lot to see there. In addition, the scenery does go beyond the city area. It covers a portion of New Jersey, one airport in Connecticut and all of Long Island. From end to end there is about 100 nm of flying area available.

Although the detailed scenery is concentrated around the city, all included airports are done accurately. I'm a pilot and live in the northeast so I've flown to many of the actual airports included in the scenery. Every airport I checked is accurately done with runways, taxiways, and buildings accurately placed.

How's The Scenery?

If you like synthetic style scenery you'll surely like New York. There is a high level of detail around the city. You can visit many of the famous buildings--circle the Statue of Liberty, cruise along to Hudson River past the Empire State Building, etc. There are many interesting bridges all over the area too...lots of fun to fly under!

The designers tried an interesting design technique which I'm not convinced was such a great idea. The city area has photo-realistic included. But this scenery does not show up until you are above approximately 4800 feet. In one way that's not such a bad thing, since other photo scenery (like San Francisco) looks quite bad close up as the digitized pixels grow too big. The problem here, though, is that you can always see the edge of the photo scenery and it just does not mesh well with the synthetic scenery beyond. Any sense of realism is lost as a result.

What's Bad?

As seems to be the case with all scenery add-ons, the documentation is very weak. The list of airports printed in the manual is incomplete. The maps are poor as well and in fact leave out some of the airports included in the scenery while showing airports that are closed.

The information that should have been in the manual is actually included as a file called README.NYC. This has the complete aiport and navaid list, suggested site seeing flights and more.

As usual, the best way to enjoy the scenery is to get the real world aviation charts. The New York Terminal Area Chart (previously called a TCA chart, but TCA's are now called Class B Airspace) covers most of the area. To get all of Long Island, though, you'll need the New York Sectional chart.

Bottom Line

This is nice scenery and I've spent a great deal of time flying it. If you are interested in the area it's well worth it. Stunt flying around the bridges and buildings is great fun and visiting all the airports, both big and small, provides plenty of exploring possibilities. The only drawback is that the area is relatively small, compared to other scenery packages like Caribbean or Japan.

Sample Screen Capture

Downtown New York City from Microsoft New York

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