Introduction

Diagoras International Airport is theonly civil airport on the island of Rhodes, which is situated on thesouthern end of the Aegean Sea. Known as the Island of the Knights,Rhodes has had a very interesting past. It was occupied by the Knightsof the order of St. Johns for two centuries starting in 1309. Thiswould leave a lasting impact on the island through the medieval Gothicarchitecture of the many structures the knights built while on theisland. These structures, including the Old City of Rhodes, havebecome tourist attractions in the recent decades. When the old Rhodesairport was no longer able to deal with the increasing number oftourists, a new airport was needed. Built in 1977, Diagoras airport isthe 4th largest in Greece by passenger volume, seeing 5,542,000passengers through its terminal in 2019. With pristine beaches,historical architecture, great weather and location, Rhodes airport isperfect for summer getaways. FSDG's rendition of Rhodes is as up todate as possible, including the new ramp layout to help the increasingvolume of traffic. So, with that said, let us go and look at thescenery!

Installation And First Look

Installation is pretty simple after a quick flip of the manual. Itcomes with a nice configuration tool to help you adjust the scenery toyour liking, including an option to turn off the static aircraft,which after finishing this review I will gladly do, based on theirinaccuracy and poor modeling which I will show later. The configuratorhas an option for custom placed olive trees which have a note of"greatly decreased performance due to a bug in MSFS", so like any goodreviewer, I promptly ignored the warning and enabled the olivetrees. The only change I could see is a small section of redone treesabout 2 miles east of the airport, so if you do experience badperformance, there's not a huge change between default orcustom. Moving on, I ventured around the city which I must say, whileit looks quite nice, it seems to have an FSX quality to it. Lower restextures, low poly models, etc. I was hoping to see the Gothicarchitecture and the Old City of the Knights in high res Asobo-likequality. What I found instead however, was a city that looks perfectlyacceptable from 1000ft up, but a little low on the detail scale forwhat I would expect in 2021.

Exploring The Airport

The airport is quite well modeled. There are lots of little detailsspread everywhere, and the terminal just screams...it's vacation time!It is not all that big, and there is no interior modeled, but in all,it looks quite nice. The trees by each of the staircases are some ofthe nicest I've seen, and really give it a nice appearance. Theentrance of the airport is lacking a little detail but is quiteacceptable, with plenty of cars parked and buses waiting to taketourists into the city. As it is quite a small airport, there is nottoo much else to explore, so I will leave the rest to the photos!

Textures

FSDG has done a good job with the textures at the airport. Theterminal, runways, taxiways, and other areas have been texturedbeautifully. Out on the ramp I was very happy to see high qualityground textures and a fair amount of wear and tear on the apron. Alltoo common with MSFS airports are the ground textures, as they are waytoo clean. FSDG has done a great job making sure that this airport hassome use on the pavement, and I am glad to see that. One small note isthat the cracks on the pavement do seem to float ever so slightly, soseeing this fixed would be awesome. FSDG has done a decent job withthe texturing. The main terminal and larger parts are very well done,however almost all of the details are low resolution and can lookquite out of place. One more downside of the scenery is if it israining, there are no reflections on the ground at the airport, and inlow visibility situations, the trees do not seem to be affected byit.

Static Aircraft

FSDG has an option to add static aircraft to the scenery, in thiscase, 2 aircraft. An Aegean A320 CEO and a Ryanair 737. From adistance they look fine, however once you get up close they fall apartquite quickly. The A320 is by far the worst, with FSDG not even tryingto get the aircraft paint right, the tail number is from an A320 Neo,as is the entire paint. They didn't even remove the A320 Neo decalfrom the nose, and Aegean does have A320 CEOs, so the fact that theydidn't just paint it in one of the CEO liveries is a bitdisappointing. The Ryanair 737 looks a little nicer, however it justlacks a registration all together. I would recommend leaving thestatic aircraft off, as they are also low resolution and just don'tlook all that great.

The City

I've already touched on the city, but I think it deserves its ownsection. I had hoped to see a highly detailed rendition of the maincity of Rhodes, but FSDG instead only made a very low-res model of thewall around the old city, the main castle, the mosque, and theharbor. The rest of the city is standard autogen and looks the same asthe default scenery.

Conclusion

This scenery leaves me with mixed thoughts. On one hand it is abeautiful rendition of Rhodes airport, the main thing we are all herefor. However, it is not an airport I would recommend if you werewanting a great scenery of the entire island in great detail. A lot ofthe textures are quite low resolution, and a lot of the models are ofa lower resolution than I'd like to see. If you are wanting a newdestination to add to your flying, then this is an airport I'd lookinto. If you are however wanting a scenery that will give you a highlydetailed rendition of Rhodes city and island, you will be leftwanting. For $25.00, it is in the average range for a scenery and doeshave nice features. It is worth some thought, but it does have somedownsides that I would be mindful of, especially if you are big on howthe scenery looks.

Joshua Moore

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