Triangle North Executive Airport (IATA: LFN, ICAO: KLHZ, FAA LID: LHZ) is a county-owned, public-use airport in Franklin County, North Carolina, United States. It is located five nautical miles (9 km) southwest of the central business district of Louisburg, North Carolina.
It was known as the Franklin County Regional Airport until November 2008, when the Board of Commissioners of Franklin County approved the new name (from Wikipedia).
Resting just north of Raleigh, North Carolina, Triangle North Executive Airport is one of the nicest and newest airports in the state. Triangle North Executive Airport is owned and operated by Franklin County, NC. It has a 5500x100 foot runway that is ILS equipped. The airport is a designated reliever of Raleigh-Durham Int'l Airport and sees nearly 200 operations per day. Most of the traffic is local general aviation and transient general aviation that is looking for cheap fuel; however, it isn't uncommon to see AH-64 Apaches and other military helicopters using the airport to practice manoeuvers. Skydiving from the Triangle Skydiving Center is a popular attraction, as the airport accommodates many jumpers daily. Triangle North Executive is home to Total Flight Solutions, a Part 61 FAA flight school that is one of the busiest in the Triangle area (from the product page).
The Airport Guys are a new FSX development Team. Composed of Michael McCracken (previously of Borderline Flight Sim) and Jon Raines (previously of fsCarolina) they pooled their talents and resources to form The Airport Guys, and KLHZ Triangle North is their debut payware product (they released Metz X as a freeware product a few weeks previously). The Airport Guys stated mission is to "capture the look, feel, and functionality of real-life airports to replace their bland, generic default MSFS counterparts."
The Airport Guys quote features as:
System Requirements--The Airport Guys state 256 MB of hard drive space and Flight Simulator X, but no other requirements. As it is a small, non-complex airport, any system that can run FSX comfortably should have no trouble running this add-on. I tested it on an IBM Lenovo G560 Laptop with an Intel i5 M480 2.67 GHz processor, a 500 GB hard drive, 4.00 GB RAM and a Nvidia GT310M 1 GB graphics card.
Default FSX |
The Airport Guys |
Description--Installation is easy. Just download the 138 MB installer from the FSPilot Shop after your transaction is complete. Run the installer and it should find your FSX installation, and install painlessly. All you need to do after installation is activate the scenery within the FSX scenery library as detailed in the manual. Incidentally, the manual is very well written and also includes charts for the airport which is really good to see.
As the above shots show, the default KLHZ is really unlike the real world airport. According to real world shots The Airport Guys KLHZ is very accurate. The scenery is of a really good quality with a sharp photoreal background. So many times sceneries are put on a low-res photoreal background which spoils an otherwise good scenery. The custom apron/taxiway/runway textures are really nice. There is also some sharp modelling especially of the airport building.
One thing that would've been nice would've been some "life" like cars in the car parks, maybe some static aircraft or even some people around the terminal.
Bugs--The only one was with the PAPI indicators. The lights float above the modelled PAPI lights.
Performance--Frames are roughly the same as the default KLHZ.
Conclusion--A superb debut product from The Airport Guys, with the tiny bug not really detracting. These guys promise great things. Check their Facebook page for updates to their next project, Myrtle Beach 2013.
Important--I am in no way affilated to The Airport Guys; I do not provide support. Please contact The Airport Guys for any needed support:
http://theairportguys.com/
http://www.facebook.com/TheAirportGuys
http://theairportguys.freeforums.org/
theairportguys@gmail.com
IBM Lenovo G560 Laptop
Intel i5 M480 2.67 GHz
500 GB hard drive
4.00 GB RAM
Nvidia GT310M 1 GB Graphics
Alexander Czarnecki
Aussie FS Administrator/Founder
alexczarn@gmail.com
http://aussiefs.webstarts.com
http://aussiefs.freeforums.org
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