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Airport Review : LYBE - Belgrade “Nikola Tesla” Airport by SkyHighSim After a bit of a lull, over the last few months there has been a few new entrants in supplying scenery for X-Plane10 that has been converted over from their FSX/Prepar3D versions. One company is Drzewiecki Design and we will cover their scenery over the next month or so, but first here is another to put their first designs down in the X-Plane10 simulator in SkyHighSim. The first release is LYBE - Belgrade Airport in Serbia known as “Nikola Tesla”. (Googlemaps®) 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. SkyHighSim LYBE - Belgrade Approaching LYBE from the south-east the airport is not hard to distinguish out from the flat plain area surrounding it. The airport's surrounding surfaces are a very different texture from the X-Plane default scenery. (Are they original FSX photo textures?) They have been blended in with the default textures quite well, but the colouring is totally different. It looks 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? Even when on the ground it looks very bright sitting in the middle of it all. Taxiways and signage is excellent, but it is a long taxi to the terminal area on Taxiway A from landing on RWY 12. There are both airbridges/jetways and hard stand areas. A1 - A10 main terminal A and C1 -C6 for Terminal C. B1 - B7 are the hardstand areas opposite and I was given B3 for my Fokker F27. Once parked I found the hard stand well equipped and ready for me with a bus and baggage cart waiting for my passengers. All through the scenery the ramp equipment is excellent, prolific and extremely very well laid out, there is no wanting there in that case. taxiway and ramp lineage is also well laid out and easy to follow. The scenery is highly comprehensive with the terminal areas and extensive maintenance ramp with its large hangars for JAT (now Air Serbia) front and center. There is a large commercial district to the rear of the JAT hangars with a puffing chimney stack puffing away in the background. 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 out part of the L terminal two for the C gates. Quality and design of all the terminal buildings and their extensions are excellent with the original winged Terminal One looking very well done. 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. The only odd thing is there is a gap between the A airbridges and the terminal? It is even highly noticeable even from cockpit when parking the aircraft? Far left of the terminal area is the brick cargo building and admin block, cargo ramp is also well stocked. There is a 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. But the X-Plane tower view is at ground level (or not set at all) buried between gates in the second image? The distinctive "Museum of Aviation" (formerly the Yugoslav Aeronautical Museum) is spacecraft looking museum and 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. Middle field is the Fire Station, and old JAT maintenance hangars. Detailing is good in the commercial area and you have three old prop airliners with grass growing around their wheels. 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. Road systems are excellent and have great flow around the airport... and into the airport to a point. Airport road approach has great signage. 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. Summary 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. 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. So how did SkyHighSim do on their first X-Plane conversion? Well very good indeed as this LYBE - Belgrade is very good scenery. But... and there is a but here in that it came very close to being almost perfect as well in an FSX design sort of way. Very small correctable mistakes in the X-Plane tower view and the gaps between the airbridges and the terminal which is noted by SkyHighSim as a small technical issue in the conversion. But the real issue is the ground textures? Many users will overlook this and say "I don't have an issue" with them and even like them in a Flight Simulator sort of rose coloured glasses point of view. And in many areas in here the green grass areas are quite normal. My personal preference is I like my scenery to flow, and that the airport (or scenery) almost blends in totally with the whole area as one. If these textures had been toned down closer to the default scenery, I think this scenery would have been close to perfect as at night with all that amazing lighting it is simply excellent. But this is a personal choice. In every area the LYBE - Belgrade Airport scenery is so very good and certainly a welcome addition to the X-Plane10 flying world. Good value as well... but can you live with that saturated ground texture colouring? LYBE - Belgrade “Nikola Tesla” Airport by SkyHighSim is now available from the SkyHighSim site : Belgrade Airport for X-Plane and is priced at only Euro €18.00 Installation : Download is 113.10mb that is unzipped to 449.10mb 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. And full instructions are provided in the manual Documents : The scenery comes with a full set of LYBE Charts (Jeppesen) and a manual (not shown). Developer Site : SkyHighSim Features : Photoreal scenery High detailed dynamic and animated objects High detailed static aircraft Custom HDR lightning Taxiways, runway and apron with realistic rendered textures Requirements: XPlane 10.30 or newer 500MB free disk space .NET framework 3.5 (Microsoft Windows users) side note : I went and revised the ground textures to see what the difference would be like? Images are here if you want to compare the textures with the official version... Review by Stephen Dutton 11th February 2015 Copyright©2015: X-Plane Reviews Review System Specifications: Computer System: - 2.66 Ghz Intel Core i5 iMac 27” - 6 Gb 1067 Mhz DDR3 - ATI Radeon HD 6970M 2048 mb - Seagate 256gb 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!

Yes I saw that deal? €5 Seems very cheap for a good scenery like this? I didn't note it as I thought the deal won't last long at that price.