Ah Sydney, the capital of New South Wales in Australia. Well known for its opera house, harbor, etc. but it’s familiar with us for its airport. Hub for Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin Australia, Sydney airport handled more than 38.5 million people in 2014, making it the 33rd most busiest airport in the world. And FlyTampa have taken on the challenge of developing scenery for this fantastic airport!
Installation
After purchasing you get a EXE totaling 926MB. The only thing you have to do is to execute the .exe file, this will launch the install wizard. During the installation you will be asked to fill in your name and serial number. Before the actual install, the wizard will ask you whether you’d like to download and install configuration libraries, add the scenery to your FS library and whether you’d like it to put the texture_max_load in your scenery.cfg to 4096 (default is 1024). Once you’ve selected your options, you just click on next and it’ll install. Simple!
First Impressions
Like I usually do, I took my PA28 to explore the airport (not knowing if the airport would be heavy on frames or not). Once spawned in I looked around first in the cockpit and then in exterior view. The first thing to strike me were the colours. Even though I don’t use an ENB, these textures looked very realistic (they didn’t look cartoonish like in some other sceneries). Being parked at the GA ramp, I was curious to find out what the terminal buildings looked like. So I started pushing back and taxied to runway 25, which was the closest one to me. When I was aligned with it, I really wished that FSX could simulate runway slopes, however it was just a long flat runway in front of me. It was once in the sky that I saw the amount of detail on the taxiways and runways: here and there were oil puddles glancing in the late afternoon sunlight, tire marks everywhere. Not one centimeter in or around the airport was overlooked. After taking off I climbed to 200ft and flew over to the terminal buildings. I must say I was a tiny bit disappointed. Even though the buildings are in a 2048 resolution, they seemed a bit blurry to me. That being said, you are still able to see that it is quite detailed (you can see the window frames, etc.).
After that I climbed a bit higher till about 1000ft to observe the surroundings, I must admit I was a bit stupefied. Each developer includes a bit of the scenery surrounding the airport, but FlyTampa always manages to do great things with the surroundings of the airport (think of the city of Dubai in the FlyTampa Dubai scenery). I was surprised to see that the buildings (the harbor, a few hotels, etc.) were as detailed as the terminal buildings. After flying a bit around, I decided that it was time to fly back. Curious of what an over water approach would look like, I decided to land on runway 34R. Most over water approaches are quite boring as you only see water beneath and around you. However this scenery includes small and larger boats navigating under you whilst flying your approach, making it much more fun to fly in. After landing I taxied a bit around the airport. To be honest denser patches of grass like in the Aerosoft Ibiza scenery would have been nice, as now it looks like patches of green color next to you as you taxi by. What also caught my eye were the taxiway and runway signs. These were everywhere all at the right locations and were also nicely modeled. The taxiway and runway markings were also complete and detailed.
Night Time Flying
I always like flying at night, seeing the lights of a city and using it as a navigation beacon is always fun and easier than during the day. The airport itself is well illuminated. The taxiways are well indicated with green lights following the centreline and here and there blue lights at the borders of the taxiway. The aprons are well illuminated due to the big light spots placed on top of the terminal buildings and around the aprons. What I really like about these is the fact that they give a kind of 3D impression of the light coming out of them, which is very realistic. The surroundings of the airport are also well illuminated making it enjoyable to fly around Sydney navigating with the illuminated buildings.
What Comes With The Package
Included in this package are: one pdf and a scenery configurator.
Unfortunately no charts are included, luckily FlyTampa gives us a link to where we can find charts related to Sydney airport. General airport information is also included as a short introduction to the pdf. A list of all the features of the scenery is summed up on page 3 and a ground chart is included. Also not all jetways are functional, the pdf includes a list of all the stands where jet-ways are functional.
To enjoy the scenery at its maximum, FlyTampa also gives recommended settings.
Like I mentioned a scenery configurator s also included this helps you activate or deactivate functions that may have an impact on your frames (apron traffic, static Qantas B747-700, smoke coming out of chimneys, waves, etc.). There is also an option to enable or disable the Safe Gate Type 1 system to guide you into the gate.
Conclusion
FlyTampa has created a great scenery. In general the scenery is highly detailed and in a high resolution, just a bit blurry here and there, but in general FlyTampa has,yet again, created a magnificent and realistic scenery.
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