Neils Beach, FSX/ORBX NZSI Options

[Sinz]

Question!

Why dos Neils Beach not come up in New Zealand Airports in FSX. Is it a New'ish Airport or what?

Flew from Haast to Neils beach yesterday and ORBX NZSI has aircraft and a couple of buildings there, but the runway I think is more a road than an Airstrip. Pilot Record after I landed there had me Taking off from Haast and landing at Hasst???

Just Curious If anyone had an answer.

Cheers

[Ian Warren]

Typical of many area's , simple to recreate the airfield if required , course now with VLC library's could be easy done and using a good AFCAD tool .

[dbcunnz]

Another one missing from the South Westland is the Fox airfield

[FlyingKiwi]

Does Neils Beach have an alternate name, I've never even heard of it before?

[Sinz]

Does Neils Beach have an alternate name, I've never even heard of it before?

Yup...

NZ-0017

South from Haast http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-43.997434,...p;t=h&hl=en

Hope I got that link right.

[toprob]

This is just one of the hundreds of airstrips in this area, and since it is a pretty remote community it is quite well used, with a couple of hangars. I don't know how NZSI works, but I thought that although it adds a lot of these airstrips, only a handful have an actual facilities file, so most wouldn't be found in the Airport list. (FSX only includes those with ICAO codes.)

Adding a facilities file has both positive and negative aspects. Really, if you can find it on a map then you should be able to fly there, certainly you can in Vector Land Class, I assume that NZSI is similar.
It is certainly an amazing location, I'd love to give it a bit of a makeover in VLC for the next airfield update. The recent major 'street view' update in the South Island has made this a lot easier!

[dbcunnz]

if you can find it on a map then you should be able to fly there,

The Fox Airfield is on the map and I have flown in and out of there several times and Mt Cook were operating sky planes there as far back as the 1950s but ORBX have not added it to NZSI.
It was in the news last year when a skydive plane crashed on takeoff just before NZSI was released but then perhaps the Aussie's don't get the NZ and world news.

[toprob]

The Fox Airfield is on the map and I have flown in and out of there several times and Mt Cook were operating sky planes there as far back as the 1950s but ORBX have not added it to NZSI.
It was in the news last year when a skydive plane crashed on takeoff just before NZSI was released but then perhaps the Aussie's don't get the NZ and world news.

It doesn't have an ICAO though. I don't know how Orbx decided which airfields and airstrips would have facilities, but a quick check shows 19 of them. (I mean AFCAD-type facilities, a lot more have scenery objects added.) I suspect that only those which require AI have these. For those who rely on the FSX Map, this is a bit tricky, but really the FSX map isn't really designed for serious navigation. When I said 'if you can find it on a map' I didn't mean the FSX map!

Tim has mentioned the possibility of adding a lot of these airstrips to the Map, which means giving them a phoney ICAO and building an AFCAD-type scenery, but doing this for all of them (1500+?) doesn't make sense -- you'd have a huge, ungainly Airport list in FSX, which wouldn't add much realism, when you could just find your destination on aeronautical charts, any old map, even Google Maps.

[Timbo]

From memory there are 50-odd 'proper' airports in NZSI... I.e ones that you can start at, these are the ones that are found in (uggh) default FSX NZ, we also added another 350+ unlisted strips on top of that (picking the more interesting ones), but these do not show up in the GPS or go-to-list, these are the sloping grass/dirt bumpy ones

We have a NZSI servicepack in production which includes a file similar to the Heli-pad+Firetowers in PNW, it will make the unlisted strips show up in the GPS (but will not clutter your go-to list)

Fox strip was missed, will be in NZSI.002 servicepack, our bad

Hope that helps

[FlyingKiwi]

The only annoying thing with not having the airfields in the airport list is if you want to actually start from them you have to start somewhere else and slew to get to them, which is a pain. Having them in the GPS would be nice - of the 350+ strips which Timbo mentioned above, most of them aren't on the VNC so aeronautical charts won't be much help. Google Earth is a great tool of course!

[toprob]

Today I went looking for Tim's thread on adding these strips to the GPS in VLC, and found it here.
There's also this interesting thread from gojozoom who was testing this for Tim, I think. I missed this at the time, but it is certainly looking great.