Stephen Posted May 25, 2015 Report Share Posted May 25, 2015 Airport Review : LYBE - Belgrade “Nikola Tesla” Airport v1 by MB Sceneries X-Plane Reviews did a review on LYBE - Belgrade “Nikola Tesla” Airport in February this year. It was originally published by SkyHighSim in X-Plane as a conversion from their Belgrade X FS Scenery of the same name. Then just as SkyHighSim came they went again as they went out of the simulation scenery business, not only in X-Plane but their original FS markets as well. The scenery was picked up by MB Sceneries (Who did most of the X-Plane conversion anyway) and now LYBE - Belgrade “Nikola Tesla” Airport has been released (or relisted) as a version v1 updated scenery. X-Plane Reviews has updated here the original review to represent the current scenery and the changes between the two releases. (Googlemaps®) IATA: BEG – ICAO: LYBE 12/30 3,400m (11,155ft) Asphalt/concrete Elevation AMSL 102 m / 336 ft History Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport - Aerodrom Beograd - Nikola Tesla) (IATA: BEG, ICAO: LYBE), is an international airport serving Belgrade, Serbia. The airport is situated 18 km (11 mi) west of Belgrade center in the municipality of Surčin, surrounded by Srem's fertile lowlands. The national flag carrier and largest airline of Serbia, Air Serbia (former Jat Airways), uses Belgrade Nikola Tesla as their hub, it is also one of the operating bases for low cost airline Wizz Air. Charter airline Aviogenex along with the air taxi services Air Pink, Jat Airways AVIO taxi and Prince Aviation also call the airport their home. Originally LYBE was officially known as the Belgrade International Airport (also known as Dojno polje Airport) was opened on 25 March 1927. From February 1928, aircraft owned by the first local airline Aeroput started taking off from the new airport. The airport's landing strip consisted of four grass runways between 1,100 and 2,900 m (3,609 and 9,514 ft) long. The project for reinforced concrete hangar was made by Serbian scientist Milutin Milanković, known more for his theory of climate change. A modern terminal building was built in 1931, and in 1936 poor visibility conditions landing equipment was installed. Constant traffic increases and the appearance of passenger jet planes demanded a significant larger airport. In the meantime there was a plan to build a residential and business district called Novi Beograd, where the airport was located. Thus, it was decided that a new international airport should be constructed near the village of Surčin. The last flight to depart from the old airport was at the beginning of 1964. The new location for the airport was on the Surčin plateau 12 km (7 mi) from Belgrade's city center. Building of the new airport started in April 1958 and lasted until 28 April 1962, when it was officially opened by President Josip Broz Tito. During that period a 3,000 m (9,843 ft) long runway was built with the parallel taxiway and concrete aprons for sixteen planes. The passenger terminal building occupied an area of 8,000 m² (2 acres). Cargo storage were also built, as well as a technical block with the air traffic control tower and other accompanying facilities. Modern navigational equipment was installed, earning the airport the highest international classification according to the International Civil Aviation Organization. Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport has two terminals, with a reconstructed Terminal 2 opened since 14 May 2006. First Impressions Approaching LYBE from the south-east the airport is now harder to distinguish out from the flat plain area surrounding it. If you had bought LYBE or read the earlier review you would have seen the extremely bright different textures contrasting against the X-Plane default scenery It looked like the airport authorities have sprayed tons of Agent Orange/Dioxin to kill any foliage around the airport and totally succeeded in turning it into an almost ungainly strange yellow/green colour? That is all gone in v1 as the textures are now all compatible your surroundings and now very nicely blend in with their surroundings. Approaching RWY12 you fly over E-70 highway and the main airport buildings are on your right with the "Museum of Aviation" UFO shaped building standing out from the rest. There is only a single runway here in 12//30 and the textures are excellent as is the approach area. Taxiways and signage are excellent, but it is a long taxi ride to the terminal area on Taxiway A from landing on RWY12... but I really liked the taxiway textures and linage. The surrounding photo textures are also very good, but have no top side grass. There are both airbridges/jetways and hard stand areas on the ramps at LYBE. A1 - A10 is the main Terminal A and C1 - C6 is for the adjacent 90º angled Terminal C. B1 - B7 are the hardstand areas opposite Terminal A and I was given B2 for my KLM Fokker F27. Once parked I found the hard stand well equipped and ready for me with a set of stairs and bollards. All throughout the scenery the ramp equipment is excellent, prolific and extremely very well laid out, there is no wanting there in that case. internal taxiway and ramp lineage is also well laid out and easy to follow. LYBE - Belgrade Overview In the last few years, X-Plane scenery has become far better in creating that overall environment feeling. And here at LYBE you can see why it works so well. From a distance or close up on the approach or taxiing on the ground the airport boundaries are not clearly defined anymore and that is a great thing for realism. Certainly payware scenery should be good at this blending, but it is still gratifying when you see it has been done right. Terminals The two terminals are in a way buried inside the L shaped rows of gates with the long part of the L the "A" gates and the short part of the L (90º) for Terminal Two for the "C" gates. There is great detailing on the airbridges and on all the ramp areas. The airbridges don't move but parking is easy. On the ground the ramps are highly realistic and feel busy, but there are no animations like moving buses. In the terminal arrival areas you can see the different old and new terminals easily and the quality and design of all the terminal buildings and their extensions are excellent with the original winged Terminal One looking very well done... Without those earlier glaring textures the arrival areas and carparks are also far better. All the airport support buildings and offices are well represented... ... with the distinctive "Museum of Aviation" (formerly the Yugoslav Aeronautical Museum) is the spacecraft looking museum which is the significant building here standing out, and it is well done but not highly reflective like the real version. The museum owns over 200 aircraft previously operated by the Yugoslav Air Force, Serbian Air Force, and others, as well as aircraft previously flown by several civil airlines. It also houses the only known surviving example of the Fiat G.50. A regular early visitor to Belgrade Airport in the Sud-Aviation SE-210 Caravelle is displayed outside the museum. Far left of the terminal area is the brick cargo building and admin block, cargo ramp is also well stocked. There is a large General Aviation area parking in front of the building, but if you fill it up it restricts movement to the cargo bays? The control tower is front and center. And I like the old style design that is created here. Tower View has been fixed as well from the original version, you can see all the ramps and the runway, but there is an obstruction to the rear... But this is not an important viewpoint. Middle field is the Fire Station and GA parking, and large old impressive JAT maintenance hangars and engine test bay. Detailing is good in the old commercial area and with factory with a very dirty bad environmental smoking record and you have three old prop airliners with grass growing around their wheels. Road systems are excellent and have great flow around the airport... and into the airport to a point. Airport road approach has great signage and great flowing traffic on E-70 motorway. It makes a difference on how you set the amount of objects to be displayed. Set your "Number of Objects" too low and the ramps are virtually empty, reset at a higher setting and they fill out very nicely. You have the choice to have the "static" aircraft on or off (details in installation below) for the VATSIM and online flying users. Departure I left LYBE to return to LOWW Wien (Vienna) and changed aircraft to the A320 bus. From the cockpit LYBE looks good. A few vehicle animations and the latest X-Plane airport features of marshal's would work very well here. I'll be back at LYBE in three hours! Nightlighting Approach to RWY 12 at dusk gives you a very different feeling than when you left.... Runway lighting is simply first rate with a rail system working for you. After landing the taxiway lighting is one of the best I have seen yet, great coloured centerline lights to guide you and flashing warning and stop lights of were you can't go. Taxi into the terminal area and you have to be impressed. Ramp lighting is about perfect and highly realistic. From above the lighting is excellent with different airport areas illuminated perfectly. Off ramp areas and outer arrival building spaces are also really good and very well laid out. Overall the runway, taxiway and distance lighting is very good and close to perfect. Services A lot of choice in services to mostly all of Europe, Northern Scandinavia, Russian Block countries and as far as the middle east in Dubai and Abu-Dhabi Aegean Airlines - Athens Aegean Airlines operated by Olympic Air - Athens Aeroflot - Moscow-Sheremetyevo 2Air Cairo - Hurghada Air Serbia - Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Athens, Banja Luka, Beirut, Berlin-Tegel, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Istanbul-Atatürk, Larnaca, Ljubljana, London-Heathrow, Milan-Malpensa, Moscow-Sheremetyevo, Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Podgorica, Prague, Rome-Fiumicino, Sarajevo, Skopje, Sofia, Stockholm-Arlanda, Stuttgart, Tel Aviv-Ben Gurion, Thessaloniki, Tirana, Tivat, Vienna, Warsaw-Chopin, Zagreb, Zürich - Seasonal: Dubrovnik, Malta, Pula, Sochi, Split, Varna Alitalia - Rome-Fiumicino Austrian Airlines - Vienna Belavia - Budapest, Minsk-National Croatia Airlines - Seasonal: Split EasyJet Switzerland - Geneva Etihad Airways - Abu Dhabi flydubai - Dubai-International Germanwings - Seasonal: StuttgartLOT Polish Airlines - Warsaw-Chopin Lufthansa - Frankfurt Lufthansa Regional operated by Lufthansa CityLine - Frankfurt, Munich Montenegro Airlines - Podgorica, Tivat Norwegian Air Shuttle - Oslo-Gardermoen - Seasonal: Stockholm-Arlanda Pegasus Airlines - Istanbul-Sabiha Gökçen Qatar Airways - DohaSwiss International Air Lines - Geneva, Zürich TAROM - Bucharest Tunisair - Enfidha, TunisTurkish Airlines - Istanbul-Atatürk Vueling - Seasonal: Barcelona Wizz Air - Basel/Mulhouse, Beauvais, Dortmund, Eindhoven, Gothenburg-Landvetter, Larnaca, London-Luton, Malmö, Memmingen, Stockholm-Skavsta CargoCityLine - Hungary BudapestCzech Airlines operated by Farnair Switzerland - Prague, SofiaEgyptAir Cargo - CairoRAF-Avia - BudapestSilk Way West - Budapest, KabulSolinair - Ljubljana, SarajevoSwiftair - Cologne/BonnTurkish Airlines Cargo - Istanbul-Atatürk, MadridWest Atlantic - Leipzig/Halle Routes1. Tivat Airport - Air Serbia, Montenegro Airlines2. Podgorica Podgorica Airport - Air Serbia, Montenegro Airlines3. Vienna Schwechat Airport Air Serbia, Austrian Airlines4. Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport - Aeroflot, Air Serbia5. Istanbul Atatürk Airport and Sabiha Gökçen Airport - Air Serbia, Pegasus Airlines, Turkish Airlines6. Zürich Zürich Airport - Air Serbia, Swiss International Airlines7. Frankfurt Frankfurt Airport - Air Serbia, Lufthansa 8. Athens Athens International Airport - Aegean Airlines, Air Serbia9. Paris Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and Beauvais–Tillé Airport - Air Serbia, Wizz Air10. Munich Franz Josef Strauss Airport and Memmingen Airport - Lufthansa Regional, Wizzair Airlines1 Air Serbia - 2,347,923 2 Wizz Air - 415,590 3 Lufthansa - 283,8674 Montenegro Airlines - 258,8415 Swiss International Airlines - 203,518 Summary In many ways this v1 of LYBE - Belgrade is quite different than the original. Certainly the majority of the basic converted FS items are still exactly the same, but the sorting out of the smaller issues and the glaringly obvious horrible green-yellow toxic textures has made this scenery a far better place to fly to. Conversions from Flight Simulator/Prepar3D based scenery for X-Plane10 can be fraught with issues because from the start the scenery was not created for the style of X-Plane. X-Plane also has very different designs on features and if you think that a quick swap and place of your completed (and sometimes old) objects into the X-Plane scenario then you are going to get the very opposite of what you are aiming for in not having either a good conversion or worse something that looks totally horrible in X-Plane. The strange thing it is usually the very small things that gets missed in the conversion and are easily done in the first place. But get the conversion right and it will work very well in all simulators. There are a lot of FSX style items and objects in this scenery that stand out. The buildings and Terminals are well transferred, but there are smaller items like radar towers that are quite FS in their design and so you get the radar domes floating in mid-air from a distance? and small stuff like that. And there are no real X-Plane features like animated autogates, vehicles or people that are a standard now in good scenery. Overall the conversion is excellent and this is very good scenery and highly realistic from the air and on the ground. Lighting is very good and you will feel at home if you arrive on a late flight, ramp lighting, excellent runway lighting and the taxi lighting will give you a really good feeling of a place and an airport. Frame-rates are good, there is a very slight soft look and feel that comes with all FS converted scenery buildings, but that is a great tradeoff in frame-rate as the scenery is refined to get maximum of as a little impact as possible on your computer demands, certainly if you crank your settings very high in the texture resolution it will be noticed, but overall it is very good. This updated v1 scenery LYBE - Belgrade Airport scenery fixed mostly all the issues with the original release. And LYBE is even better now and even better value as well as it is at a lower price... and also available at the X-Plane.OrgStore rather than the download from SkyHighSim. So yes LYBE - Belgrade is a great addition to your collection and a great investment. LYBE - Belgrade “Nikola Tesla” Airport v1 by MB Sceneries is now available from the New X-Plane.Org Store here : LYBE - “Nikola Tesla” Belgrade Airport and is priced at only US$16.00 Note : MB Sceneries are working on a deal for all older original purchasers to be able to upgrade from the SkyHighSim product to the MB Sceneries v2 version, I will note here when the situation has been clarified. Installation : Download is 108.40mb that is unzipped to 568.40mb and is placed in your Custom Scenery folder. "Static" aircraft can be inserted or removed by changing over your "apt.dat" folder in the scenery, both "on" and "off" versions are supplied in the "MODS" folder. And full instructions are provided in the manual. If you want the ghastly FS textures then they are available in the "MODS" folder as "Vivid". Just replace the "Overlay" images in the MBS_Overlay folder. There is a set of standard images supplied if you want to go back to normal textures. Documentation : One Manual (That includes two charts) Features: Photoreal scenery High detailed dynamic and animated objects High detailed static aircraft Custom HDR lightning Taxiways, runway and apron with realistic rendered textures Update Review by Stephen Dutton 25th May 2015 Copyright©2015: X-Plane Reviews Review System Specifications:Computer System: - 2.66 Ghz Intel Core i5 iMac 27” - 9 Gb 1067 Mhz DDR3 - ATI Radeon HD 6970M 2048 mb- Seagate 512gb SSD Software: - Mac OS Yosemite 10.10.1 - X-Plane 10 Global ver 10.32 (final) Addons - Saitek x52 Pro system Joystick and Throttle- Bose - Soundlink Mini Aircraft- Airbus A320-214 CFM Engine by Peters Aircraft (X-Plane.OrgStore) US$54.90- Fokker F27-600 by atgcab (X-Plane.Org) Free! MercuryMat 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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