Spain Global Scenery 2000

By Andrew Herd (29 March 2001)

hese three sceneries are part of a larger series which will ultimately include all the larger Spanish airports and many of the smaller ones. My interest in the packages is that although new European sceneries seem to appear every day, the majority are limited to single airports - while the Spanish Global Scenery 2000 (SGS2000) set includes many features necessary for VFR. The fact that there seems to be an "Easter egg" around every corner makes the packages immensely attractive, and despite the fact that the airports aren't completely perfect my opinion is that these sceneries are well worth a look, purely because they offer so much for the VFR flyer.

Non-techies will be delighted to hear that there is an automatic installation routine for each package, although as a default it doesn't install the scenery within the FS2000 scenery tree. Neither does the install routine modify the scenery.cfg file, which means that the airports have to be added manually via the "World/Scenery library menu" of FS2000. After doing this, I was still left with two entries for Madrid Bajaras in the airports menu of FS2000, which would indicate a missing exclude file, but the scenery behaved normally despite this.

Now to the airports. Alicante, in the south-east of Spain, must be familiar to several million northern Europeans, as it is one of the most popular package holiday destinations in the world. From Alicante, thousands of tourists are bussed every day to the nearby resorts, including the infamous Benidorm, which is faithfully modelled, along with five other villages and the beach itself.

Alicante is the first and the least ambitious of the Spain Global Sceneries, and this is reflected in the price. For $11.95 you get an attractive imulation of the airport and its surrounding area, including the nearby Muchamiel aerodrome. The approach to Alicante runway 28 is probably the main reason for buying this particular scenery, as finals are over the sea and dropping the aircraft in over shipping and between two groups of high rise apartments goes to make for a visually interesting landing. One you are safely down, the taxiways faithful to the original and are based on AENA standards, but the lines are rather thick and some are noticably off center. At present this is the only large airport in the SGS2000 series with static aircraft, although the other sceneries will be updated in due course. The terminal, hangars and service buildings are very pleasing to the eye, including the striking architecture of the control tower, but there are problems with textures on the buildings which in some cases are very basic and unattractive close to - it would be good to see this fixed in a patch. The taxiways, terminal and apron are nightlighted, so you will be able to recreate dawn arrivals of 737s full of bleary-eyed Club 18-30 partygoers to your heart's content. Ideal for the DreamFleet/Flight One 737 when it comes out, so start sharpening up those Gatwick and Stansted departures right now.

Madrid-Barajas was the second scenery to be released in this series. The title is misleading because instead of one airport you get four, together with detailed scenery for an incredible wide surrounding area. The other three airports are Cuatro Vientos, Ocaña, La Iglesuela, all of which are on a much smaller scale than Barajas itself, but are pleasingly well detailed and ideal for pleasure flights. In addition, you get Fuentemilanos aerodrome in Segovia province - this is well known to all the Spanish flightsimmers because it has been the base for the Spanish flightsimmers' official organization for some years.

The rest of the scenery include the city of Madrid itself, 48 nearby villages, several distinctive lakes used for VFR navigation, and a huge variety of other natural and man-made features, including windmills and cathedrals, many of which I cannot recall seeing in FS2000 scenery before. Circling high above the airport, the landscape has villages scattered all over it, and if you fly south awhile, you can even find the city of Toledo, where I remember my uncle having a memorably complete sense of humor failure over a fish-head he found in his soup, one day long ago in 1964.

Barajas is a much larger airport than Alicante and this is reflected in the complex runway system in the simulation, complete with taxiway signs and lines - this time much better proportioned and properly centered. It is a fun scenery, quite different from the usual run-of-the-mill "here's an airport plonked in the middle of miles of standard scenery" approach, and after a couple of weeks of using it I am still coming across things I have never seen before, such as the stone cross at Valle de los Caídos and the palace at Aranjuez. The additional villages give a new dimension to VFR flying, and I have found myself hoping for good vis when I am flying STARs, purely for the enjoyment of picking out the landmarks - something that Flight Simulator is seldom able to offer.

As far as I can tell, all Bajaras' gates are there, though none of them are animated, and there are no statics, which makes the airport feel rather lonely (static aircraft will appear as a freeware release at a later date). The airport is completely night lit, to a rather higher standard than Alicante. However, my main criticism is that once again, some of the textures need to be binned and redrawn from scratch. Though they look fine at a distance, the buildings can be incredibly unattractive close to, and are they nowhere near as well executed as say, Gary Summons' scenery or even Wilco's Airport 2000 series. If all you never taxi off the runways this will not be a problem, but if, as an increasing proportion of simmers are doing, you like to execute proper "gate-to-gate" flights, then the deficiencies of the textures may well be an issue, because they will be right in your face as you are doing the start-up checks.

The Seville scenery features another four airports, including San Pablo International Airport, Jerez de la Frontera (at Cádiz), Córdoba Airport, and the private La Juliana aerodrome near Seville. Like the Madrid scenery, the airports are only part of the package, which is best thought of as VFR scenery covering the south west Spanish provinces of Sevilla, Cádiz, Huelva and Córdoba. As the manual says, with the scenery installed, you can go on a sight-seeing flight along the Guadalquivir River from Seville to Córdoba, spotting villages on the way. And there is a lot to see: nearly 80 cities and villages, all of which have custom-built buildings, including churches and castles - you even get the rock of Gibraltar thrown in, which is a big improvement on the FS2000 version.

Much the same comments that I have made about Madrid apply to San Pablo. The main buildings are all there and as long as you don't mind the lack of interactive gates and can put up with the coarse textures at close range it is a fine airport. As with the Madrid scenery, runway and aproach charts are included, which is a bonus, even if they are in Spanish, and of course you get down-town Seville with numerous buildings and custom designed monuments.

I cannot recall ever having seen anything quite like the Spain Global Scenery, with the exception of the recent Netherlands freeware project. While the majority of commercial sceneries give you an airport in a wasteland of flat FS2000 scenery, with this package it often seems that the further you fly away from an airport the more there is to see. It should certainly be high on the wish list of any European VFR flyer, and the airports are plenty good enough for passenger jet operations. The only people this scenery is likely to disappoint is the hard-core big-iron fliers, because if all you want are commercial airports, then the SGS 2000 sceneries work out pretty expensive compared to competitors like Airport 2000, which offer several international hubs for much the same cost. On the other hand, the VFR flier who buys all of the sceneries will end up with 11 airports and 130 cities, towns and villages, many of which have custom designed buildings and monuments. I do both types of flying, and I have found that with SGS 2000 installed, Spain is a source of endless fascination. The only serious criticisms I have to make is that for nearly $25 I expect the installation routine to modify scenery.cfg for me, and I would like to see some of those textures replaced with something more pleasing to the eye.