FSX Cardington NAS Scenery

Cardington NAS (EGRA) UK. Cardington NAS near Bedford, UK was the base for airship manufacture and operations from 1917 to 1938. This scenery represents the airfield in about 1928, with the launching airstrip, the mooring tower, the two giant airship hangars, and the Short Bros factory. Airship R101 occupies Hangar 1; Hangar 2 is empty and the doors are open. The main runway is asphalt surfaced and suitable for conventional aircraft, with NDB locator and offset ILS. By John McKeon. (See also EGRA_FSX_1.ZIP and EGRA_FSX_2.ZIP).

A name forever to be associated with airships is Cardington in Bedfordshire, just two miles south-east of Bedford. Lying alongside the A600 road to Shefford, today it is one of the very few remaining airship sites complete with its original No 1 Shed constructed in 1917, as well as its No 2 Shed erected in the 1920s.

DATA
Name EGRA Cardington
Location N52 06.516 W000 25.158 Alt 100ft AMSL
Runways 25R/07L Asphalt: 2990ft x 200ft : hdg 252 deg
25L/07R no surface: see NOTES: hdg 252 deg
NAVAID NDB NDBC CARDINGTON 403.0 kHz
ILS INAS CARDINGTON 110.500 mHz
OMI markers
PAPI approach lights
COMMS TOWER CARDINGTON 134.650 mHz
HAZARD 2 hangars 160ft tall (alt 260ft), 1 mast 240ft ft tall (alt 340 ft)
Services Parking (6 bays), fuel, repair and maintenance services are located at the North corner behind the airship sheds.

FS NOTE Cardington Tower viewpoint is located 240 ft AMSL at the top of the mooring mast. Runway 25L/97R is invisible, at ground level, but should be elevated to the mooring mast gallery level this will be rectified in a future release (when I find out how to do it!) ILS and NDB are emulating a visual approach and docking signal system for the mooring mast, as 25L/07R, but may be used for offset approach to the asphalt runway 25R/07L. If an airship model were fitted with carrier arrester gear and tailhook, it could make a controlled approach and dock with the mooring mast, if the runway were elevated (see above).

Aircraft: FSX is poorly served with airship models, I have only found one, a medium sized modern Zeppelin, an excellent model with authentic handling characteristics. It is in the screenshots. (zepntfsx10.zip, by Thomas Roehl, Joerg Hammes and Stefan Medelnik).

Installation: Unzip the archive to a temporary folder, and move the Cardington folder to [FSX]\Addon Scenery\ folder, then use FSX Scenery Library Editor to Add Cardington. This preserves the documentation, but you may prefer to place the subfolders \scenery and \texture directly in the \Addon Scenery\ folder.