Hopefully this page will answer most of the questions you have regarding the scenery, if it doesn't do visit the Support Forums and see if the question has been asked before, if not do post your question I am sure it will be answered pretty quickly.

Question: Will the scenery work with Flight Simulator 2000.

Answer: English Airports for Flight Simulator 98 is ONLY compatible with Flight Simulator 98, it is intended to design all new Flight Simulator 2000 versions of the airports which will should be available in the late spring 2000. NB: Also note the scenery is unlikely to work in earlier versions of Flight Simulator as well, or with unpredictable results!

Question: I have installed the scenery but when I go to the airports or fly to the airports, bits of the ground or buildings disappear completely or come and go.

Answer: The most likely cause of this is that you do not have the Flight Simulator 98 patch installed on your system which causes the scenery buffer to overload. You must install the Flight Simulator 98 Patch, this comes with most commercial FS CD's and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Web page at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/games/public/flightsim/fs98pat1.exe

Question: I have installed the patch but it still behaves strangely?

Answer: Please ensure that you have installed the scenery as described in the readme.htm file that comes with the scenery, especially ensure that you have enabled the scenery from inside Flight Simulator 98 and copied the scenery and texture files to the correct directory.

It is also important that you install the scenery at a higher (lower number) layer than the scenery you use for the rest of Great Britain, if in doubt put it at the top of the list.

Another thing to check for are any Static or Dynamic Aircraft you may have installed, these are highly likely to overload the scenery buffer, and I can only support any aircraft you download from these web pages!

Question: I see lots of strange colours or the scenery looks just like the default FS98 scenery after I have installed English Airports for FS98

Answer: The scenery and or textures are not isntalled properly. Ensure that the directories/folders are set up as desribed in the readme.htm file. Some pictures of what the different windows you will encounter during set up are shown below (these are examples they may be different if you choose different directories/names for you setup).

This shows the directory/folder structure that is needed to be created to install the scenery, the names of the directories below the main English Airports one must be SCENERY and TEXTURE

This shows the default installtion of English Airports as described in the readme.htm, this screen can be reached by selecting World - Scenery Library - Files - Add from the FS98 Menu

Question: When I look at the installation texture.zip file I see lots of small zip files, what do I do with these?

Answer: The texture files associated with each of the airports use the IATA code for that airport as a file extension, just so the texture files can be more easily identified. The IATA code for Birmingham International is BHX, so all the texture files for Birmingham end .bhx. Winzip associates .bhx files with an old file compression type called BinHex once used on Apple Macintosh computers, so they look like small zip files.

They are not zip files, just extract them to the TEXTURE directory/folder along with the other texture files.

Question: If I slew into the car park, park inside the small shed and look out behind the plane from spot view the scenery doesn't look right, how come?

Answer: Whilst every effort has been made to try and make the scenery as accurate as possible and with a few display errors as possible. The nature of Flight Simulator 98 is such that it is necessary to compromise on making the scenery display properly or else the scenery will become too big, too slow, or both if you try and fix every display problem.

The scenery has been optimised to work at it's best when viewed from the cockpit and only where aircraft would normally go, i.e. on the taxiways, to/from the runway and of course approaching the runway.

Whilst the scenery was extensively tested it is not impossible we missed something (the airports are so big and complex!), so please let us know if you find any problems at support@gbairports.co.uk, we will do our best to fix it.

Question: Where are the Gate Guidance systems and how do they work?

Answer: We have added a page to explain how the many different Gate Guidance Systems work and directions on where to find them, Click on this link to view the information.

Question: How do you design the scenery?

: I use Abacus Airport and Scenery Designer, Schiratti Control Center and lots of my own software for most of the base design, but the vast majority is designed using SCASM (a scenery design compiler, for those of you who remember DOS or use UNIX you know what I mean) and a text editor. It is old fashioned and hard work but is the only real way to design the best scenery!

This page was last updated 19th August 2000