KMSS International Airport vicinity including:
- Re-texturing and tree cleanup short of runway 5 to match reality
- Clean up up treelines and sightlines to the right of runway 5 within 1500 ft of runway - added missing trees along river, removed trees that didn't belong, added human planted groves/borders of trees
- Added BJs Wholesale sight using default Asobo model as stand in (only represented by an odd "parking lot" in the default sim) to the north of the end of runway 23.
- Added stand in scenery for Alcoa Massena West aluminum plant and nearby power plant, as well as Arconic Massena Operations plant - these are NOT photogrammetry, nor hand modelled at this time. But they are way better representations than the missing representation from the autogen.
Installation: simply drop the folder from inside the zip file into your community directory (or a symlink via addonlinker or similar). Delete zip file as you desire. You don't need any more.
So a few weeks ago, shortly after the release of World Update 11: Canada, I am out having a lazy Sunday touring flight originating near Niagara Falls, doing a bit of fly-with-a-friend. We took off and flew around in circles there for a bit admiring the scenery around Niagara, and our flight plan had us then following the St Lawrence seaway to the northeast, all the way to Montreal. But as it happens, the real world sometimes intrudes on sim world. Where I live, it was getting on towards dinner, and I had a rumbly in the tumbly. So the immediate thought - hey, let's land somewhere else, short of Montreal. A quick scan of the area on the old G1000NXi found a nice regional looking airport, which is technically an international airport, in upstate New York - KMSS. So the fella I was flying with and I deftly entered a DirectTo into our Garmin systems, and flew there. It was by then, quite dark. Which is getting to the heart of my short story. We approached KMSS, and visibilty at night was awesome. I marvevelled at the reflection of the moon in my wing in the Bonanza I was flying, and decided to do an overhead join and land VFR. Left pattern was flown nicely, and as I rolled in on final, something was odd. In hindsight, it should have been obvious. But at the moment, on short final to an airport I've never seen or been to in real life or sim life, it didn't dawn on me. In 10-15 seconds, I would find out however that the autogen had placed some lovely, call them 80 foot trees about 50 feet short of the threshold to runway 5. My beautiful approach and 90 minute flight was ruined crashing into some trees. Ouch. I hate it when that happens, dying and all.
I've never contributed a scenery or anything - but this crash became the impetus to finally do so. I've messed around with the SDK a few times and done some stuff just for me, but I thought this one needed to be improved for everyone, lest someone else find themselves crashing into trees that are most decidedly, not there in real life. So here is my first community addition. Once I started to get the hang of it, it quickly became a monster I could not tame. What started as simply removing trees turned into learning about texturing and improving issues with that, then fixing some other brushy areas that were not quite right, then noting buildings that were wrong or completely missing, and just more and more fixes. I started reading about the history of this border town in upstate New York, learning a bit of the history of it and the airport. This lead to learning that the Alcoa smelting plant there sadly shuttered, though I believe that was Alco Massena East, and Massena West, which is a processing facility (extrusion and casting I believe) is still operating. The Alcoa facilities there are the oldest and largest continual operating aluminum production facilities in America. They **likely** made aluminum there that is represented as 1's and 0's in so many of these sim planes. I love me some history. So the perfectionist in my would like to go back and model the Alcoa plant buildings, the power plant, etc. And if enough people are interested, perhaps I will eventually. But I have a path to walk with custom modelling (I know CAD left and right, but with Blender I'm a noob), and other projects I'd like to finish and contribute to the community. So all in good time. More soon!
I've done testing myself, and with my friend and haven't per se found any bugs. But if there is an issue, please let me know!
JakeFlight
gryper
The AFD says there is a "52 ft Pole 1649 ft from runway, 430 ft right of center" of RWY5, but no trees. Trees are at the end of RWY9 - "88 ft Trees 1764 ft from runway, 365 ft left of center". Clear at the ends of 27 and 23.
blanco71 author
Yes - I didn't add the pole. I can go in and do that. It looks like it's a power line. I also didn't touch anything with trees off the other runways. I mostly was using G-Earth as visual reference for where the trees were, and dropping them in that way. Timing of when the sat photos are taken for my references were in 2015, which was intended to roughly coincide with the age of things in the sim timing.
2 years ago