UK 2000

By Andrew Herd (4 January 2001)

UK 2000 is an extraordinarily ambitious project which aims to supply professional quality scenery for every airport in the United Kingdom when it is complete. The package is the brainchild of Gary Summons and it is no exaggeration to say that he has designed some of the highest quality airports ever made available for FS2000. At present, a complete install covers almost every airport south of London, including the Channel Islands, and the next release, due in June, will extend the scenery to include East Anglia and the north-east London area.

Installation is no problem thanks to an automatic setup routine which copies the files and even sets up scenery.cfg. Manuals are available for each part of the scenery and extensive support and some free downloads are available from the web site.

Gary was inspired to begin UK2000 in May 1999. He told me, 'I got myself Airport and Scenery Designer from Abacus and starting making my own work. The first scenery I made was few palm trees for St Maarten Island., then came my local airport of Bournemouth. I decided to make the entire UK, after I realized how popular the Channel Islands scenery was. The task have never been daunting to me, but others have said that I could never do it by myself, thankfully I don't listen to them!'

When he began, there were relatively few detailed airports available for the UK, most of which were shareware. The one exception to this was the aging Apollo Europe 3 package, which covers Great Britain below the 54th parallel, but Europe 3 is only compatible with FS98 and runs to just over 100 airports. By comparison, UK2000 provides 53 airfields in much greater detail - a figure which will rise to 86 when part 4 is released and about 300 when the project is finally done in late 2002.

Gary's dedication to detail, and the consistency with which he has delivered on his promises, have made this one of my favourite sceneries. I have downloaded each installment with great anticipation; and so far I have not been disappointed.

Part 1 covers the Channel Islands and it makes a good place to begin. I decided that the best way to review this scenery was to take you on a trip, and we'll begin at Guernsey. See how early FlightSim.Com reviewers get up in order to get the best screen shots? Much to the irritation of all the passengers waiting in the terminal for a delayed charter flight, I got strapped in, checked in with the tower (who still talk about my last approach - at least the wreckage doesn't obstruct the runway) and set off into the dawn. It was a fine day, as it often is over the islands, and as I set course for mainland England I had a fine view of the Gary's scenery spread out below me. The Channel Islands are different to the rest of UK2000 because the landscape has been created with custom tiles. Although it is Gary's ambition to develop a full custom tile scenery for Great Britain, he has limited their use to Part 1 at present. FS2000 has an annoying limitation on displaying tiles after about 16 km and I normally avoid sceneries which use them like the plague, because (a) once you have gained any altitude you can always see past the 'edge' of the most distant tiles and (b) there are frequent white 'flashes' as new tiles load. The Channel Islands suffer slightly from flashing, but the small size of the scenery means that this is very limited and I have never found it much of a problem. The airports are obsessively detailed, and you can even taxi into some of the hangars as long as you take it easy.

My first stop was St. Just, after some fancy footwork through the Land's End traffic corridor. There is a great deal of military helicopter and fixed wing traffic in this area and in real life aircraft transiting the airspace need to contact Culdrose on 134.05 MHz, or St. Mary's should the former be shut down. Every time I fly through this area in FS2000, I make a mental note to sit down and do some military tracks in FSTraffic to liven things up, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Fortunately, other people haven't been so idle and tracks for several of the UK2000 airports are available from Gary's web site.

St. Just and the airports which follow are in part 2 of the UK2000 scenery, which contains 25 airfields in total.

As you can see the weather was deteriorating and I had a hairy landing in a strong and gusting crosswind before I could taxi in and have a simulated cup of coffee (if you try this flight, don't bother with the coffee - Gary's coding for the coffee machine needs some kind of a bug fix).

After refuelling, I set off from Land's End to RAF St. Mawgan, just to see the place. My father used to drive down there every day one time in the sixties, setting off in the wee small hours from the north side of London in a 1.3 litre Sunbeam Rapier that he paid for out of a contract his company had to paint the hangars. Base leg is over the water and it makes for a visually interesting approach - the hangars need repainting again, I reckon, but the rest of the airfield is laid out to perfection.

From St. Mawgan I flew to Plymouth in deteriorating conditions that quickly became IFR. Unfortunately, my ADF was built Stateside and doesn't display enough digits to tune the weird fractional frequency NDBs that we have in Europe, so ATC had to vector me in. I got a good view of the bridge before turning and landed in visibility of much less than a mile. Never before had Fred the batsman been such a welcome sight. Looking up at the clouds there didn't seem much chance of any further flying that day so I left the Cherokee on the pan and took a virtual taxi home.

In the morning FS2K conditions were better, largely because the real weather was so diabolical that I decided not to fire up FSMeteo and instead set some clear skies and no wind.

I had been offered a test flight in a 737, so I pitched up at Farnborough (contained in UK2000 part 3, along with 23 other airfields) and eased myself into the left-hand seat of the oldest, doggiest, most hard-used jet you could care to find for FS2K. Half the trim panels were missing, an engineer had left his screwdriver in the cockpit and I am not even going to discuss the state of the floor. But then how often do you get to fly one of these things?

As usual, I got lost in the airport and we found ourselves on the wrong side of a line of cones, but we managed to sneak past while no one was looking. After doing the checks and pocketing the screwdriver, we were vectored to Gatwick at 10000 feet, a short flight, but a busy one, given we had ATC on our case the whole time and the entire world seemed to be flying in our airspace.

The approach was easy, especially since I remembered to lower the gear on this occasion, and we taxied off the runway to our stand without incident. Gary has made Gatwick available as a separate download for $10.00 on-line or £5 by UK mail order. If you fly from Gatwick with this scenery, I recommend you download Robert Harris' masterful FSTraffic tracks for the airport, which are insanely good and bring this busy airport to life with full taxiways and a constant stream of departures and arrivals.

On release, part 4 will include Heathrow, and if Gary's Gatwick is anything to go by, this is going to be a must-have. Work is at an early stage and I have just one screen shot of a terminal available to give some idea of what is on offer, but a stand-alone version of Heathrow will appear at the end of January, ahead of the full part 4 release. Gary was tight-lipped about the development, but he did say, 'It will have every stand, every airgate, dynamic vehicles, 50+ static planes, the most spectacular night lighting ever seen in FS2000, and the frame rate will NOT crawl along. I'm developing it on a P500, if it's not flyable on my PC then I won't release it.' There will also be another Rob Harris megatrack for FSTraffic to go with it.

If you fly in the UK and are interested in making FS2000 as realistic as possible, then you should buy this product. Not only is it one of the most detailed sceneries available, but it is supported and updated with great dedication by its designer. You can even try before you buy, as long as you are prepared to put up with shareware 'walls' across the majority of the runways - but do get your credit card out if you continue to use it, because Gary uses the money he makes from this product to fund further development and if we don't pay, we won't get. Looking at the screen shots, my first thought is that we owe it to ourselves to help him complete this tour de force.

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