Birmingham Airport

Birmingham Airport (EGGB), UK. Features improved parking with airline codes added, new runway turnoffs, better vehicle paths. Also include similar scenery for EGDG. By Colin Dietrich.

Installation:

Copy and paste/drag and drop the AFCAD file 'EGBB_ADE_FSX.bgl' into the 'Addon Scenery/Scenery' folder of your FSX installation. It should then require no further activation and the new airport layout will subsequently appear by default. Experienced AFCAD users may have their own folder into which they place additional afcads, in which case, simply install it there. To remove the AFCAD delete the same file from the same folder and the default airport will be back.

The default FSX Birmingham airport is fairly accurate in respect of overall layout of the real one. Birmingham Airport web site lists many airlines that use this airport thirteen of which I currently have with additional AI. This extra air traffic makes the need for some improvement vital and is the driving factor behind this AFCAD.

So, what's been done?

Firstly, some of the parking spaces have been enlarged and moved about a bit. Four new parking spaces (three with jetways) have been added for larger aircraft on the western side of the airport and the two cargo spaces have been moved to enable this. Airline codes have been added to all the jetway serviced parking and a few of the non jetway ones but the rest have been left open for the default AI, both airline and GA. The GA, which take an eternity to clear the runway, have been allocated their own grass taxiways to cut this time down. Though extensively tested with all sorts of aircraft there is a possibility that you might see an airliner taking this route off the runway but, hopefully, it will not happen as they have nowhere to park. Two new runway turnoffs have been added and do make a visible impact, which differs from the real airport. The previously closed taxiway has now been put into service. This has been necessary to provide a faster cross runway route for arriving aircraft to get back to parking. Most of the airline aircraft will use the eastern side of the runway to turn off but a few will use the western side which means they will have to cross the runway to get to the parking. Whether they make it to parking depends on how busy the air traffic is at the time but occasionally some inevitably disappear. The GA aircraft have their taxiways and parking on the western side but, as before, FSX ATC is a capricious beast and some will end up on the opposite side. Vehicular traffic has been tamed with the addition of extra vehicle paths and hold ups to aircraft because of vehicles are virtually nil. With a busy single runway airport (the 6-24 runway is not used) there are times when aircraft queuing to take off will just disappear. There is nothing that can be done about this given the shortcomings of the FSX ATC but the overall effect of all the changes that have been made is greatly improved air traffic flow.

I hope this AFCAD improves your enjoyment of FSX, if not simply delete it.

Acknowledgements:

Most the AFCAD work was done using ADE by Jon Masterson. ADE is a freeware utility which functions similarly to AFCAD2 by Lee Swordy. My thanks to both authors. ADE is currently under development and is improving continually. Acknowledgement must also be made for the Microsoft SDK for FSX which has been used to compile flight plans and, additionally, is required for ADE. In addition World of AI (WOAI) and Project AI (PAI) have my thanks for the many packages of aircraft and flight plans which make up some of the additional AI that I currently use. Some work must be done to utilize these packages in FSX and AIFPC by Peter van der Veen has helped with this. Thank you Peter. My appreciation for help and advice also go to RAY Smith and to Jim Vile who's better knowledge of how FSX works has saved me going down pointless paths to air traffic improvement.

Finally, I would like to thank all of the talented people who make their work so freely available to us all.

Colin Dietrich

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