Seriously, when this sim can have flat airports??

Hi,

Ever since the addition of European airports and later more global airports in the past 5 years, we keep seeing uneven terrain such as bumps or sunk in the airports around the runways and taxiways. They not only cause difficulty in maneuvering the aircraft (touch the engine and crash), leading to incorrect altitude callout and ground effect at landing, but also tremendously decrease the immersion of the sim. This issue pervades globally, even in many major airports:

LFPG, Paris (This is one of the first-batch global airports, still not fixed after 4,5 years...)

EDDF, Frankfurt (This is the #1 airport in your home country, IPACS, seriously?)

ZUTF, Chengdu (Call the trucks to remove those little hills of construction materials left by the construction team!)

RJAA, Narita, Tokyo

YSSY, Sydney

WMKK, Kuala Lumpur

These are just the tip of the iceberg. Basically for all airports, as long as they are not by the sea, have this issue, more or less.

As other users previously mentioned, these are bugs, NOT missing features, and should definitely receive higher priority in your workflow. As a user who's been flying Aerofly for over ten years, I support your decision to prioritize developing a widely demanded new aircraft such as the A350 and adding more systems depth. But spending the time and resources in developing a less popular Me262 than fixing these bugs makes no sense at all. Airports with even terrain should be something basic for a flight simulator.

So PLEASE, IPACS, don't keep your users wait for another year (or 5 years and more..., who knows). Correct the terrains of the previously added airports to complete them before adding new ones. This is a serious and critical issue of this sim and should definitely receive much higher attention than it currently does.

Another related bug is when switching to the developer camera (e.g., in replay mode), the airports is reloaded. At some airports, the ground level is suddenly changed and crashes the aircraft.

In addition, there are many incorrectly placed autogen residential buildings around/within the airports which hugely decrease the immersion. For example:

VHHH, Hongkong

Hopefully all these bugs can receive your attentions and get fixed soon.

Thank you very much!

Quote from 747

Something like this not ruins my experience with Aerofly. Fixes like this can take a lot of time, and I think that this isn't their highest priority.

IPACS, please correct me if I'm wrong with this.

So you mean they should leave there forever? I’m sure in this case you can always find something with “higher priority”.

They should at least spend some resources start the fixing and do it one by one. It’s been five years and not a single airport is corrected.

Quote from Overloaded

Can we curtail the increasingly self elevated presumptively entitled criticism of the new aircraft additions. I am glad to see the real variety of aircraft types in Aerofly, including the Me 262 imposed upon us through considered wisdom from above.
If the ‘fun game social multiplay’ party among the newer forum members had their way we would get nothing other than shiny white twin turbofan medium to large transports for years to come.
As it stands we get one seriously interesting plane for every half dozen new near identical spam cans.

Ok, agreed. The variation of aircraft types is indeed very important and users with different tastes should all be catered. I take back my previous comments on the Me262.

But they definitely should start working on fixing the airports.

Quote from Overloaded

I was definitely not zeroing in on you but there has been a sort of ‘peasants revolt’ atmosphere brewing recently slagging how stupid the planes choice has been and how some coup junta or show of hands ought to control our new planes.

Let's keep the topic to the airport terrains. Thanks!

Quote from Overloaded

Possibly the core of the sim is deemed to be irreparable and the lack of information might suggest that no attempt will be made to address the range of outstanding deficiencies?
There is bound to be some work already done on the eventual replacement to FS4 and FS global and perhaps any deficiency consideration is aimed at not having these problems appear in that development?
The only glimpse of their intentions that I saw was the comment that adjustments or repairs would need a time consuming gigantic screen and alteration of a mountain of data and they are not overly enthusiastic to start soon or to do it too often.

They now have data as detailed as the airport runway and taxiway map globally. Although I don't know what their data structure for the terrain is like, I don't see this a very difficult task. Simply set the mesh vertex value in the vertical direction to the same (maybe the average value of the airport coverage) for the airport and surroundings or apply a filter to smooth the values and prevent large gradient. Another solution is to also add models and texture for the area between and outside the runways, taxiways and ramp, like what's being done in those old Swiss airports. Anyway it's really frustrating that this seemingly simple issue never gets fixed.

I think the biggest problem might be that they don't think this isn't a big deal and won't bother working on it. If that's true, I feel really sorry for this simulator.

Quote from Jet-Pack (IPACS)

This is a known issue at some airports where the elevation data is incorrect. Unfortunately there are still other high priority items we have to address first, because this issue involves more changes under the hood than would appear from the outside.

Ok thanks. Wouldn’t expect too much but hopefully we can get bug-free airports as a 2026 Christmas present.

Quote from Jugac64

Our capacity of complaining is endless thanks for the patience and resilience IPACS team!

Seriously? What a sycophant... And yes, if something as basic as this not getting fixed for 5 years, they deserve to be complained and their customers are completely entitled to do so.