RAAF Pearce YPEA

I found some good custom scenery for RAAF Pearce airforce base in Western Australia. I used to live next to the base in real life during my primary school years. At that time, our house backed onto the approach path for one of the runways and I used to see a lot of aircraft, mainly Aermacchi 326/339, Caribou, Orion, Bell helicopters and occasional Mirage jets.

I was trying to locate a good Aermacchi, this is a very good one I found by Dino Cattaneo.

Don't forget to download and install the RPWG scenery library.

Guadeloupe, St. Bart TFFJ, Free Scenery

I downloaded some custom scenery for St. Bart, a French island in Caribbean. It is a very detailed scenery of this little island, but unfortunately seems to be some incompatibly with something else I have as the end of the runway is a little sub-merged under land. I fixed the issue, by moving the sliders for Scenery Mesh and textures to the far right.

I did try to land a helicopter on the Queen Mary 2 that is in the bay, but without success due to my poor helicopter skills. A YouTube of the scenery TFFJ Freeware Video.

There is payware scenery for St. Bart, St. Maarten and Saba by FlyTampa. Here is a little YouTube clip of Cessna landing with this scenery Addon:




Also some scenery available from FranceVFR.

Saint Barthélemy is in the Leeward Islands, in the north of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. To fly from there, select Guadeloupe as the country and select ICAO code TFFJ. The runway length is less than 2100ft.

JustFlight, RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge

These twin ex-USAF bases are in Suffolk, just east of Ipswich. They are not in the FSX default scenery or airport list. The custom scenery adds the folder ACGTwinBases to the Addon Scenery folder. The ICAO codes for the new bases are EGVJ (RAF Bentwaters) and EGVG (RAF Woodbridge). They can be downloaded from JustFlight.

RAF Bentwaters

RAF Woodbridge

The two bases are very close together, you can see Woodbridge in the background of my first screenshot. It is quite possible to takeoff from one and immediately land at the other. This is very nice free scenery.

Free scenery and aircraft addons from Just Flight

Some freeware addons over at JustFlight, including scenery. The RAF Waddington scenery is good, but I couldn't get the RAF Coningsby scenery to work. RAF Waddington EGXW, is located just a few miles south of Lincoln and has been created by John Young and the team at UKMIL.

Also, freeware aircraft, including Boeing 757 This is a lush addon, liveries in British Airways and American Airlines. The aircraft comes with an impressive manual in PDF format, including detailed guide to full manual takeoff. Also included flight plans for use with the simulated cockpit computer.

So here is my new addition, 757 taking off from RAF Waddington:

The aircraft is as good as any payware in my opinion. In order to download this aircraft, you have to register on the site and confirm your email address, then go to the checkout page and it is available for download.

I downloaded the Imperial War Museum Duxford by Airfield Construction Group, also available as Freeware on JustFlight website. It  is very detailed, but does not slow my system down too much. It comes with an Air Show package, which I did not try. It has the option to install a version that integrates well with my Ground Environment X, this is quite notable on where the roads join.

Duxford Imperial War Museum

North Wales, RAF Mona, RAF Valley and Caernarfon EGCK

I have been flying around North Wales near Anglesey. Anglesey Airport EGOV, is shared with RAF Valley.

I am using some custom RAF Mona scenery, Caernarfon is from Alf's UK airfields, Volume 9. I tried out some RAF Valley freeware scenery, but there was nothing that was an improvement on the default scenery.

Here is a photo of the real airport at Caernarfon:

Here is a capture of the custom scenery for Caernarfon:

Here is a capture of the custom scenery for RAF Mona:

It includes a nice refuelling area.

The following screenshots are from updating the scenery to use Orbx FTX Wales. AlphaSim Hawker Hunter taking off from RAF Mona:

Newquay, St Eval and Perranporth, Cornwall, UK

I used to live in Newquay and loved surfing Perranporth, so this is a favourite place for me to fly around. I am using some custom scenery for Newquay EGDG. This is the former RAF St. Mawgan.

Newquay EGDG

The scenery includes the disused air-strip to the north for RAF St Eval. The old RAF station does not have any ICAO/IATA code.

St Eval

Also, worth a look is some custom scenery for Perranporth air-strip , EGTP. I am using the design from Alf's UK Airfields, volume 9.

Perranporth, EGTP

EISG Sligo Airport

Sligo (City) Airport is located just to the south-west of Sligo at the far end of Strandhill Beach. I downloaded some custom scenery to enhance the experience. This is the view from the default Cessna:

EGAB Enniskillen Airport

As I live in Bundoran, County Donegal, Ireland, my first flight was from Sligo to Enniskillen. I was not aware of the airport at Enniskillen until I spotted it visually. St. Angelo was originally a Royal Air Force station in the Second World War. It is a single strip, close to the banks of Loch Erne.

I downloaded some custom scenery to make the airport a little more interesting.

Here is a screenshot of my takeoff from runway 33 in a FlyingClub PA 34-200T Piper Seneca II.

The official runway chart is found on the Enniskillen Airport website in PDF.

Setup, Configuration, Drivers, Tweaking

I have had FSX for many years. I bought the Gold edition, which includes the Acceleration add-on. The game is already 9 years old, so should run pretty smoothly with a fairly up to date PC. My system is Windows 7 Professional, 8GB RAM, AMD Phenom II 965, Nvidia GTX 760. It is a system I built myself, based on a Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H Motherboard. It's not totally up-to-date, but should be more than capable of running FSX at maximum settings. I have a BenQ GL2460 monitor and a Speedlink Blackwidow flight stick. Previously I have played FSX with a Microsoft Sidewinder precision joystick.

After initial installing, I was very surprised by the really choppy graphics, the game running very, very slow even with graphics turned right down. I came across the solution by chance, in that I got a debug error window from Visual C++ runtime. The message was to do with "Damage after normal block", that sounds quite serious! I opted for ignore and Googled the error message. Turns out the error is associated with the Blackwidow drivers, so I uninstalled the drives and fall back to using the default Windows 7 USB Game controller drivers. The performance difference was remarkable. Not only did it fix the VC runtime error, but my frame-rates went through the roof.

I tweaked my FSX.cfg file that I located in C:\Users\Mark\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\FSX

These are the settings I added to the default config file:

[JOBSCHEDULER] 
AffinityMask=14
[BUFFERPOOLS] 
PoolSize=0
DisablePreload=1
[GRAPHICS]
HIGHMEMFIX=1
ForceFullScreenVSync=1
TextureBandwidthMult=100
[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=1000
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=800

I had bought Flight One Software's Ultimate Terrain X Europe + USA and Ground Environment X Europe + USA, I also have France VFR scenery for all of Bretagne (Brittany).

I have some extra aircraft from Just Flight's Flying Club X, which I picked up from a charity shop.