Looks like the US residents have recieved a bit of preference when it comes to home town modeling.  My home town airport KMHT, Manchester NH, is well done.  The auto-gen buildings in downtown Manchester are just about perfect.  My actual home town (Londonderry, to the south of the airport about 5 miles) is just residential and the auto-gen houses are a good representation, along with all the major roads.

I downloaded a terrain map for the area and it really brought the whole thing to life.  Now the elevation is spot-on accurate (it was too flat before).  I can even recognize my favorite hills which I've suffered on many times on my bicycle.

I haven't seen mine in FS9, but in 2002 Pro its.... not there! Go to Cardiff EGFF, and fly North for about 50 Miles and your there!
Dan

My hometown is Albany, NY. The main airport is KALB. I think the largest plane that files here is an UPS 757, although a 747 landed here once. It was carrying Bill Clinton.

MS did a good job with the area. It is very realistic. If you check it out in FS, it will give you a good idea of what it really looks like.

Hey y'all:

There's two airports in Columbia, SC -- KCAE and KCUB.  The former is the Metropolitan airport, and is fairly reasonably modeled by fs9.  I found an add-on in the simviation archives that updated the airport to make it look more like the remodeled newer one.  Does a pretty good job, except I need to work on something
with the file, since the AI aircraft park in the middle of the expanded buildings now. 

I've only been to KCUB, the downtown GA/charter airport, once, to pick up a friend who'd flown in (lucky dawg).  I know the area surrounding KCUB in fs9 doesn't really resemble what's on the ground out there.  The other surrounding areas in the city are half-way decent.  The mighty Congaree river is where it's supposed to be. Some of the buildings downtown are recognizable, though there seems to be no sign of the three biggest landmarks visible from the air -- the various buildings at the University of South Carolina, and the distinctive Williams Brice Stadium, home of the Fighting Gamecocks (GO COCKS!) , and a huge granite quarry across the river that's very visible on one of the approaches into KCAE.

Someone in the thread mentioned Ketchikan.  Incidentally, I was up there on an Alaskan cruise this summer, and as the ship pulled out of the harbor to go up the Lynn Canal, it sailed right past Ketchikan airport, just as an Alaska Airlines 737 was landing.  Needless to say, I wasn't listening to the onboard naturalist's commentary on bears at that moment.

Quote:


Allosaurus -- try millions.  The basalt flows near Twin Falls are about 2.4 or so million years old, if I remember my old graduate field of study correctly. [The flows near Arco, at Craters of the Moon are about 2k years old, the youngest in the contiguous 48.]  I tramped out in the Snake River plains in the mid-90s on fieldwork.  And I think fs9 does a pretty decent job of modeling the general emptiness of the land out there!

[Ok, I think this has been my longest post on here to date!]

Quote:


To fix the weird taxiting , landing, and parking issues with add on visual scenery you need to edit the AFCAD file.  Get the new version of AFCAD for fs2004 and load the file in question according to the instructions.  Then you can move the locations of where AI goes.

best,

....................john

Quote:


Thanks a bunch -- I'd downloaded AFCAD, but haven't yet gotten around to experimenting with it.

BTW, after writing that last night,  I went for a spin in a 172 around Columbia again -- and really, though some of the buildings resemble downtown from a distance, the topography and terrain doesn't match reality much at all.  Even the confluence of the Broad and Saluda rivers, which meet to form the Congaree, is missing.  I don't have any terrain mesh's or anything else downloaded [yet!] ... so I'm sure that's a factor.

[Oh, and I'm writing this from the gate area at KCAE, where there is free wireless net access ... yay!]

I agree with the U.K. being poorly represented!

Strange, I'd have thought the beauty (!) of Stoke on Trent would be an obvious FS9 candidate!     

Theres some excellent payware for the U.K. scenery but frankly I can't say I want to see Stoke from the air, its bad enough from down here! 

My local town, Northampton, England, is OK for a defualt town and you can take off from Sywell GA airport and fly north west to the big town area, my house is somewhere there. Never though they modelled much of Europe's scenery well. They had American city blocks in English cities, I mean come on, Our cities are higgledy Piggledy, we like 'em that way!