VFR Reviews
Aerosoft’s Lukla X - Mount Everest
By Ashton LawsonAerosoft, both a well-known and well-respected company producing quality addons for flight and train simulation, quite a while ago produced a very nice quality scenery of Lukla, one of the highest airports in the world, the first base camp for those wishing to conquer Everest, and the place to go if you like awkward, high-altitude uphill landings or downhill take-offs (more like drop-offs actually).
Looking back in my download folder, we have three files, the scenery installer, the scenery update installer, and finally the mission installer, at 58MB, 31MB and 17MB in size, respectively. Each file downloaded easily, and installation couldn’t have gone smoother, so I have zero complaints in that department.
So, since it was a pretty cool intro at the time, I might as well explain it to you guys as well. I started Flight Simulator X, went straight to the missions and selected “Lukla Landing”, which comes in two flavours, one using the Cessna Grand Caravan, the other using the de Havilland Twin Otter. It just so happened that I installed the Twotter as well (a very nice aircraft, but that’s for another review), so I chose that flight, and off I went.
You start off flying up high in the mountains, and the first thing that comes to mind apart from the dramatic clouds looming ahead and the extremely loud engines is the custom textures and terrain on the mountains. Very nice to look at, many contours, ridge-like, very realistically-shaped, with the only bummer being that the trees don’t really blend well. Still, that first scene is very dramatic.
Continuing on, as you approach, the whole setup for the mission is very well done, clouds are just perfect, and watching the airport come into view is a very dramatic sight. The only complaint at this point would be the voices in the mission, because you hear your co-pilot, you hear the tower controller, but their voices just go up and down, up and down, and it’s very difficult to understand what they’re actually saying. I haven’t flown to Lukla, I know little about radio communications in aircraft, but if YouTube videos and television documentaries are anything to go by, then the recordings for these Lukla X missions are quite bad.
However, since I’m not real authority on the matter, let’s just move on to the actual scenery.
Taking a broad look at the area, a good distance away from the place, the scenery looks very nice, pretty much photo-real, though as I get closer, the textures get ever blurrier, which is to be expected, so I worried little there.
As I touched down I began to notice many things about the scenery, particularly in textures, that looked somewhat off. The initial thing that really got me was the rock wall at the end of the runway. We’ve all heard of seamless textures, and the wall texture is indeed seamless, but it was like a bad joke in a way. It was mirrored. One part was copied, flipped, pasted on the other side, and this is supposed to pass for a seamless texture?
Another thing that got me was the ‘grass’. In many sceneries, the grass on the sides of runways are well done, transparent, well-shaped, and continuous, but in Lukla’ case, the grass was solid, with only 1-bit transparencies, and was broken up into sections, much more like strange purple mini garden fences.
I will not lie to you, I was quite shocked at these two fundamental issues, which, in my opinion, could’ve been fixed fairly easily or at least had a little more priority than they apparently did. I understand that the scenery was designed for Flight Simulator 2004 originally, but even the seamless rock wall texture could be better.
Texture issues aside though, the scenery in general is still well-designed. Rolling up the runway and turning around in the parking area, showed off the detail put into the scenery, and overall it’s good.
Flying around revealed much more custom terrain, and if you ignore the basic flaws that I pointed out, it is a very nice scenery addon, with few other issues that are worth mentioning. Or if they are worth mentioning, they’re mentioned in the scenery’s documentation, since they have pointed out a couple flaws that weren't avoidable.
This review is quite broken, I have to admit, and I am a little disappointed in the product. For some reason I expected more than what I got, something probably related to how some products can be over-hyped. All in all though, it is a good addon, not something I’d place at the top of my list, but for those who want to try landing at Lukla, or just fly around its area, this is your only choice, and as far as single options go, it’s pretty decent.
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