Introduction

Welcome to my first scenery review forFlightSim.Com. In this article I will be sharing my thoughts on asmall Swiss airfield, Bad Ragaz by AG Sim.

Bad Ragaz Airfield is located in one of the most scenic areas ofEurope, the Swiss Alps. It offers private flights plus recreationalgliding. Judging by the number of videos found on YouTube, it seems tobe quite popular with pilots, and I can see why.

Installation

Installing the scenery was very easy and typical of most sceneryadd-ons for Microsoft Flight Simulator. After my purchase from theFlightSim.Com Store, I downloaded the zip file, which was around 360 MB(quite large for such a small scenery) and extracted it to a temporaryfolder on my desktop. I then copied the scenery to my MSFS Communityfolder and that was all which was needed.

Documentation

Sadly, no charts or documentation were contained in the package,which I felt was a shame as even small sceneries such as this shouldinclude some form of documentation.

The Scenery

I have only been to the Swiss Alps once, and this was when I wasfourteen years old, way back in 1999. It was a large school trip, andapart from my friend being sick next to me on the coach, the journeywas very enjoyable. One thing I will always remember was how much thelandscape changed. I am used to quite flat scenery in France, and sowatching the mountains grow higher as we journeyed into Switzerlandwas very exciting. We were there for only a week, but even after allthese years, I can still remember how beautiful the scenery was. So,when I saw this airfield on sale, I thought I would go exploringagain, but this time by air (hopefully no sick).

The small airfield of Bad Ragaz is situated in a valley withmountains on both sides, with the town of Bad Ragaz locatedto the southeast. The airfield itself is quite simple, in that it doesnot contain many buildings.

There is one main hangar and maintenance facility, as well as asmall cafe area. Outside of this are several tables and parasols,which seem to be Flight Simulator assets. However, these have beenplaced very carefully by the developers and match the real locationwell.

The airfield's primary use is general aviation and glider flights,and static models of both these types of aircraft are ondisplay. These can be found parked mostly around runway 30 and in themain aircraft hangar, along with a few maintenance staff members. Theairfield also includes quite a large number of glider trailers and themajority of these have been placed behind the main hangar.

The texturing and modelling work of the buildings is of areasonably high standard and looks good, even when you get upclose. The alpine environment can be quite harsh at times, especiallyduring the cold winter months, so it was good to see weatheringincluded in the textures, including rusty metal.

Not far from runway 12, there are a couple of small buildings andparked cars, and here I found the texture work to be of inferiorquality. The maintenance building looked good, as did the parked cars,but the house unfortunately looked like it was made from browncarboard and did not look good at all.

As well as the buildings and static models, the developers havealso placed large amounts of vegetation around the airport. An exampleof this is the 3D grass (lots of it), along with trees andhedgerows. It all looked good and did not appear to slow my systemdown.

Both runway and taxiway ground textures were well defined andblended in nicely with the seasonal ground textures which surroundedthe airport.

Due to its location and height above sea level, I wanted to seewhat the airfield looked like in the winter. A quick change of theweather settings in Microsoft Flight Simulator and I was greeted witha snowy landscape. I was very impressed with how it looked, especiallythe snow around and on top of the buildings.

Night Lighting

The airfield isn't used at night, but I was interested to see whatit looked like all the same. There are no runway lights as expected,but the hangars and maintenance buildings have just the right amountof lighting added, and it looks really nice.

Performance

The PC I use for flight simulation consists of an RTX 3070, with32 GB of RAM, a Ryzen 3800, with MSFS installed on a 1 TB SSD. It's areasonably high-end system with quite a few complex sceneriesinstalled, so I was not surprised to see that Bad Ragaz ransmoothly. I'm not sure how it would perform on lower end systems, butI think due to its complexity, the scenery would work very well.

Conclusion

This is one of the smallest and simplest sceneries I have purchasedfor MSFS, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Bad Ragaz. Thereisn't a lot to the scenery itself, but what there is, works wellenough. For myself, the airfield provided an opportunity to explore anarea of Europe I have fond memories of, and I think it you are lookingfor a small airfield in which to explore the Alps, Bad Ragaz makes agreat choice. It could do with some documentation and texture work,but apart from that, it's almost faultless. Now that I know of AG Sim,I'll definitely be looking at their other sceneries.

Jean Martin

Purchase AG-Sim - Bad Ragaz for MSFS 2020

See other scenery from AG Sim