After flying for about twelve hours from Schipol Amsterdam, I was pleased to finally get a small break outside the aircraft on my way to Jakarta in Indonesia. We had a two hour stop in Singapore's Changi International Airport and I still remember how surprisesed I was, when I walk through the jetway and into the passenger area of this airport.
It was almost like walking into a big living room with soft furniture and nice decorations. The floor was covered with a nice carpet and rebellious as I am, I took off my sandals and walked around bare footed. I've been in Singapore Changi Airport one more time since then and I only have good experience of the few hours we stopped there.
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| Default | Very Singapore |
Singapore Changi Airport (ICAO: WSSS), or simply Changi Airport, is the main airport in Singapore and a major aviation hub in Southeast Asia, with about 17.2 kilometers (10.7 mi) north-east from the commercial center in Changi, on a 13 square kilometers (5.0 sq mi) site.
The airport, operated by the Changi Airport Group, is the home base of Singapore Airlines, Singapore Airlines Cargo, SilkAir, Tiger Airways, Jetstar Asia Airways, Valuair, and Jett8 Airlines Cargo and serves more than 100 airlines flying off to some 200 cities in about 60 countries and territories worldwide, The airport is a secondary hub for Qantas, which uses Singapore as the main stopover point for flights on the Kangaroo Route between Australia and Europe. Qantas is the largest foreign airline to operate from the airport, with over two million passengers annually. In 2010, the airport handled 42,038,777 passengers, a 13% increase over the 2009 fiscal year.
This made it the 18th busiest airport in the world and the fifth busiest in Asia by passenger traffic in 2010. Since its opening in 1981, the airport has made its mark in the aviation industry as a benchmark for service excellence, winning over 360 awards since 1981, including 27 'Best' awards in 2009 alone. Changi Airport's efforts to counter the onset of age include periodic physical upgrades to its existing terminals, building of new facilities and the provision of a high level of customer service.
Changi Airport has two parallel runways, 02L/20R and 02C/20C, each 60 m (200 ft) wide and 4,000 m (13,123 ft) long. 02L/20R was completed and opened in 1981 as part of the airport's first phase. It has a displaced threshold of 740 m (2,430 ft) leaving the rest of the runway at 3,260 m (10,696 ft) long. 02C/20C, formerly 02R/20L, was built completely on reclaimed land and opened with phase 2, 1.6 km (0.99 mi) apart from 02L/20R. Four instrument landing systems (ILS) are installed on the two runways to guide landing aircraft safely under all weather conditions.
A new parallel runway 02R/20L (named 01/19 when opened in 2004) was built 1.8 km (1.1 mi) to the east of 02C/20C, currently used only by Republic of Singapore Air Force aircraft as part of Changi Airbase. The new runway is expected to be extended and eventually be turned into a third runway for the airport in future expansion plans.
To prepare for the arrival of the Airbus A380, the airport put into place modifications costing S$60 million, which it has planned for since the late 1990s. These included the building of 19 gates capable of handling the large aircraft, eight of which are in Terminal 3. Baggage claim carousels, runways, and taxiways were expanded, and two new freighter aircraft stands and two remote aircraft parking stands built. Two aircraft taxiway bridges spanning Airport Boulevard leading to the terminals also had shields installed on either side to shield the road from the jet blast. On 11 November 2005, the airport became the first outside Europe to receive the A380 for airport compatibility verification tests, and was the first in the world to have an operational triple-passenger loading bridge fit for trials.
With Changi-based Singapore Airlines being the launch customer for the Airbus A380, works to ensure full capability in handling the large aircraft were given priority in time for its introduction in October 2007. The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore spent S$60 million in upgrading the two existing terminals and airport infrastructure, including enlarged gate holdrooms, new finger piers, and extended baggage belt carousels from the normal 70 m (230 ft) to 90 m (300 ft). With these new carousels in place, the airport does not expect embarking and disembarking passengers and baggage from the A380 to take longer than it does from a Boeing 747-400, which carries fewer passengers. On 16 August 2005, Changi Airport unveiled the first of 11 specially-built gates capable of handling the giant aircraft. Costing S$15 million, the gates or 'fingers' enable passengers to board the upper deck of the new 555-seater aircraft directly from the gate hold rooms. The hold rooms themselves have been enlarged and appointed to cater for the larger number of passengers aboard an A380. Beside the 11 new A380-capable gates at Terminals 1 and 2, eight more A380-capable gates were opened at Terminal 3 on 9 January 2008.
This add-on comes only as a download version. Installation is easy. Unzip and run the installer. There are no documents or setup menu, along with the installation file. Once installed and loaded into FSX you find yourselves at a runway much like the default one. After a closer look you realize that it is actually the default runway, but the marking on the runway did change a bit. Most buildings in Changi airport are located between two runways and here is where Samsoft has done their work. Samsoft paid most attention to the stuff around the arrival, passenger and jetway area.
Viewed from above it is a nice improvement from the default scenery. Most obvious is the added terminals and remodeling of the buildings around the passenger area. Trees along the highway leading to the airport have been added to the scenery. The jetways have been remodeled as well, along with more appropriate surface in the parking and gate area. Samsoft also added some attaching buildings inside the airport area like aviation hangars, office building and some other logistic building inside the airport.
The existing terminal has got a minor makeover. The added terminals look nice from a distance, but at a closer view it does reveal some lack of details. Some of the building have got pictures in the front to create the illusion of stuff going on inside the buildings, like cars parking inside the building. Most of the attached buildings like hangars and cargo buildings seem to be done in a hurry. They are not that detailed and have a blurry surface.
Outside the jetway area, the taxiways has been made a bit wider. Other than this, Samsoft kept the default outer lines and mainly kept it as it was from the default scenery.
After your first take-off from Changi Airport and turn you head towards the City you will notice that Samsoft lack of attention in some parts of the airport is because they spent some time in the workshop, creating the Singapore city instead. Here they designed a whole new set of building inclusive some of Singapore's hotels and landmarks, like Singapore National Stadium, Orchard Road Quay ports and China town housing. Close to the harbor you'll see static boats and ships in the sea.
Samsoft added some nicely modeled skyscrapers, office buildings and residential buildings. The urban area feels much more real and alive with this improvement. It's fun to grab a smaller aircraft after landing in Changi airport and take off again for a small sightseeing tour.
From the default scenery, Changi has got some more lighting around the central buildings in the airport that makes up for the passenger area. More opvious is the lighting across the improved urban city of Singapore. This is very nicely done. Approaching Changi on a clear night will give you a nice sensation of arriving at a large metropolis.
It was quite easy to test the performance of Changi airport, because Malaysia's main international airport in Kuala Lumpur is only about 170 nautical miles away. So I did a couple of flights between the two metropolises in different aircraft starting with the default FSX Boeing 737-800.
Then I switched to Wilco's Boeing 737-400 Classic and finally I took a low altitude flight in PMDG's BAe Jetstream J41 turboprop. No matter the aircraft I didn't notice any significant drop in the frame rate at all. Not surprisingly the most obvious drop in frames was on approach to Changi Airport.
There isn't a lot of add-on scenery available for the Asian region and I think it's a shame. Asia has many interesting places to explore from the sky. I'll give Samsoft some credit for taking a different path than other developers and creating a nice airport scenery of one of Asia's large metropolis.
The Very Singapore X is a fine scenery add-on with the creation level being a bit above average. If you only focus on the creation and detail of the airport alone, this add-on might disappoint you. If you, in the other hand, appreciate an improved airport scenery along with an actually urban city of your destination, this definitely would be an add-on to consider.
Ricky Petersen
r.petersen@net.telenor.dk
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