UK Scenery

he vast majority of add-on scenery for flight simulator is for the United States, but recently some excellent scenery has begun to be released for Europe, and the UK is particularly well served. This review aims to cover what I regard as the best of UK scenery available for FS2000 at the time of writing. If your favourite scenery has been left out, let me know and if an opportunity arises to revise this article, I will include it.

The UK has a web site dedicated to scenery add-ons called Magrathea and it is worth checking it out from time to time if you want to keep up with what is going on. Magrathea is not, however, exhaustive, and some of the files I am going to list here have not appeared on Magrathea yet.

More for want of somewhere to start than anything else, I shall begin with the capital. London City Airport has been extremely well catered for in a series of files by Oliver Minchin, and Iain Murray among others. The result is that we not only have an extremely detailed airport with static aircraft [lcyfinal.zip], but also many surrounding features, like the Millennium Dome and Canary Wharf [canarywf.zip]. You can also add in London Westland Heliport [eglw1_2k.zip], by Kyprianos Biris and detail fanatics can install london2k.zip by the Reiffer brothers, which includes Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street, Covent Garden, Marble Arch, Wellington Arch, Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens. The only thing this scenery lacks is a really good Dash 8 panel so that we can fly out of it in style, but I live in hope.

Outside the city center, all three of London's major airports are available in detailed versions. As befits one of the world's major airports, Heathrow is given more detailed treatment than usual in FS2000. It is also available in Airport 2000 Volume 2 by Wilco Publishing £29.99 ($34.95), and in Barry Perfect's GB Airports package at £16 ($23.95). If you are interested in British airports, Barry's Heathrow is a bargain, because the package includes five other major airports in the country, all of which are executed to a similar high standard - more of these later.

Two versions of Gatwick are available. The first is in Barry Perfect's package, the other was authored by Gary Summons, and is available as a shareware download for a mere fiver from his web site. I can never make up my mind which of the two I like best, so they both sit on my hard disk. Gary's Gatwick has the advantage that you can try before you buy, as long as you don't mind having to fly through a 200 foot high wall half-way down the runway. Barry's airport is no less well done, although at the moment it looks a bit lonely due to the lack of static aircraft. And for those of you who just can't do without Bradwell nuclear power station in Essex (a well-known VFR mark), Jez Bills has made it available [bps.zip].

You also have a choice where London's third airport, Stansted, is concerned. John Young's Stansted [egssjy3.zip] will be familiar to anyone who has completed my scenery installation tutorial, but the airport is also featured in Barry Perfect's package. Again, there is little to choose between the two versions and I keep both installed

Since we have already mentioned three of the airports in the GB Airports package, I might as well introduce the rest - Manchester, Birmingham and Luton. Barry's collection is ideal for beginners, chiefly because it comes with an installation routine that not only sets up the airports, but also modifies the scenery.cfg file, a task which deters many users from installing the abundance of add-on scenery that is available.

Gary Summons has taken on the enormous task of modelling all the airfields in the UK with his UK2000 project. Part 1 has been out for some time in the shape of his Channel Islands scenery, available for $17, though you can 'try before you buy' again, as long as the brick wall shareware 'reminders' half way down the runways don't give you a problem. I found a few glitches, but it has no competitors and once I got it up and running OK it has been fun to fly. I shan't easily forget setting off to Alderney from Plymouth and arriving in dense fog - to say that I was glad it was only a simulation is an understatement! Part 2 covers 26 airfields in the south-west and I can thoroughly recommend it at $17. Part 3 covers the south-east and is a tour de force. It is going to be some time before Gary can do the research necessary to start on the rest of the UK, but this is such a fantastic collection of airfields that he deserves the support of all UK flight simmers. If you have any photos of airfields outside the areas Gary has already covered, he would appreciate seeing them - you can email him from the UK2000 website.

Various other UK airfields are available from other sources as singletons - the best of these are Wycombe air park [booker.zip] (better known as Booker) by Paul Roberts. The same author's Popham airfield [popham.zip] may only be a grass strip, but well designed and fun to fly - I'd recommend a Piper Cub for maximum enjoyment; and Paul has also done St. Mawgan/Newquay [stmawgan.zip] and Penzance heliport [penzance.zip].

Moving further afield, Barry Perfect faces some competition, in as much as there are versions of both Birmingham and Manchester available as freeware. Raimondo Taburet's airport [mankv1.zip and man2v1.zip] is a must, particularly if you are a fan of hot air balloons. With this scenery installed, you need never fear being lost on a VFR trip, because the balloons can be seen for miles in all directions. A nice version of Birmingham by John Walker is also available as freeware [bham2k.zip], though some users report problems with the ILS and there is also a package by David Morgan [bham.zip] which adds buildings to the city center.

A little further north, Blackpool has been done in style [bplv0_1.zip] by Danny Rowlands of the A1 Scenery Club, and you can even see the illuminations, if you download [blpl2k11.zip] by Rob Thorne. There is also an excellent Liverpool airport, [livv0_3.zip] from the same stable, which is quite fun to land at, since the approach is over the Mersey and Danny has also produced the rather off-beat [bkpcv2_0.zip] Black Knights parachute center. If you can't do without Leeds Bradford airport, Tim Stewart has produced a version [leeds20.zip], but his airport has rather prominent yellow taxi-way markings which show up from about 20 miles out on my setup, which I find a bit off-putting.

I am glad to be able to report that the most important regional airport in the UK, Newcastle, has been done in fine style by Don Alexander. You can download the first version here [egnt10.zip]. I can't find much wrong with it and have been using it as my default field for ages.

Glideslope Software has a package available which provides VFR scenery for the north of England, with another ready for release shortly, which will cover the Lake District. 'North West England' covers an area approximately 77 km by 102 km, stretching from the west coast at Birkenhead to Stalybridge in the East and from Slaidburn in the north to Crewe in the south. The package is available for £14.99 and will be of interest to anyone familiar with the area, although I should point out that the airports which are included are fairly rudimentary. The specially painted tiles which make up this scenery show almost every road in the region, towns have accurate outlines and rivers are accurate right down to the tide being out on the Mersey, with acres of mud-flats on view. However, if there is a disadvantage with this type of scenery it is that FS2000 sets a visibility limit of 20 km for custom tile display. Depending on how sensitive you are about this sort of thing, it may be a problem, because it means that the 'edge' of the scenery is in constant view once you have gained more than a few hundred feet. It is also possible to see the custom tiles loading, which is sometimes associated with a distracting white flashing effect (this can also be seen in Gary Summons' Channel Islands, by the way, but the small size of the scenery means that it isn't so bad). The solution is to turn visibility right down so that the edge is out of sight, but it rather defeats the object of the exercise and it would be good to see this limitation fixed in the next version of Flight Simulator, as it affects some otherwise very attractive packages.

We have not one, but two versions of Edinburgh. The first, by Ian Ropper, is split between many files and covers the airport and numerous other pieces of local scenery, including the Firth of Forth islands [isles_v1.zip], the power station [fvps.zip], Arthur's seat [arthurv1.zip], Blackford hill [blackfrd.zip], Calton Hill [calton.zip], Corstophine Hill [corshine.zip], Craiglockhart Hills [ewclh.zip], Braid Hills [braids.zip], and the Pentland Hills [pentland.zip]. The airport itself has been issued in a number of different files and updates [ef2kv2.zip, eftex.zip, ef2k_v3.zip, ef2kv3fx.zip]. Although the splitting of the scenery among so many files results in a messy installation, this is an excellent representation of Edinburgh and knowing Ian, I doubt that he is finished with it yet, so expect more before long.

Edinburgh obviously attracts Ians, because Iain Gallacher has also done a scenery for the airport, and his version includes some elements of the city, including the castle and Princes street, Waverley Station, Holyrood Palace and some of the surrounding hills. Leith Docks and the Forth shoreline are also realised, making this a worthy rival to the other Edinburgh. You only need to download three files to install this version of the airport [edinapt3.zip]. Iain has also converted a version of Machrihanish Airfield from FS98 to FS2000, but I was only able to get this to work under the 'scenery from FS95 and before option' and it is worth being aware of this before you download it.

Glasgow Prestwick has had the treatment from Simon Marsden [egpk2kv1.zip] and this is an exceptionally nice scenery, in my view. Like Liverpool, the approach is over water, and as a bonus, the airport includes the Polar hangar which has been under construction this year, along with a collection of static aircraft. Pelle F. S Liljendal has also released a Prestwick scenery, which is an exceptionally good one, in my view, not least because it includes a considerable amount of useful documentation [prstwck.zip].

Raimondo Taburet has released freeware mesh scenery which covers the whole of the UK in two files, [uk_mesh1.zip] and [uk_mesh2.zip]. This is a fantastic contribution to UK scenery, and it makes a huge difference to some areas, particularly the Highlands of Scotland and the English Lake District. Limitations of the data on which the mesh is based mean that the south of England remains as flat as a pancake, particularly near the coasts (don't go expecting the White Cliffs of Dover), but I think these files should be an essential download if you have a reasonably fast machine.

So the good news is that for almost the first time there are very few regions in the UK which don't have any detailed scenery available for FS2000. The one exception is Northern Ireland, and we can only hope that the authors of the excellent FS98 scenery that is available for the region will update it in the near future. Meanwhile I will keep you posted. Happy flying.