Paris CDG 2005. Published by sim-wings. Reviewed by Stephen Murphy.
In my opinion there is nothing like flying into Paris Charles de Gaulle. The sheer size of it would make even the least interested stop for a second. With its 4 runways that are constantly in use, its large maze of wandering taxiways and its unforgettable Terminal 1! As a passenger flying into CDG most of us are overcome with the amount of taxing required to get to the gate, crossing many feeder roads and motorways along the way, with its huge traffic loads; you are never short of things to see.
In 2004, Charles de Gaulle Airport ranked second in Europe in terms of passenger traffic with 51,260,363 passengers, behind London Heathrow Airport (67,344,054), and just above Frankfurt International Airport (51,098,271). In terms of aircraft movements, Charles de Gaulle was number one in Europe with 525,660, above Frankfurt International Airport (477,475) and Heathrow (475,999). In terms of cargo traffic, Charles de Gaulle was also number one in Europe in 2004 with 1,876,900 metric tonnes (2,068,928 US tons), above Frankfurt (1,838,894 metric tonnes) and Heathrow (1,412,033 metric tonnes).
After seven years of planning and construction, CDG began service on March 8, 1974. Terminal one was built to an avant-garde design consisting of a ten-floor high circular building surrounded by seven satellite buildings each with four gates. The main architect was Paul Andreu, who was also in charge of the extensions during the following decades. Terminal 2E, with a daring design and wide-open spaces, was CDG's newest addition. However, on 23 May 2004, not long after its inauguration, a portion of Terminal 2E's ceiling collapsed near Gate E50, killing four people. Terminal 2E had been inaugurated in 2003 after some delays in construction and was also designed by Paul Andreu. Administrative and judicial enquiries were started. Coincidentally, Andreu had also designed Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport, which collapsed while under construction on September 28, 2004. In February 2005, the results from the administrative enquiry were published. The experts pointed out that the there existed no single fault, but rather a multiplicity of causes to the collapse, in a design that had little margins of safety. According to them, the concrete vaulted roof was not resilient enough and had been pierced by metallic pillars; and some openings weakened the structure. Sources close to the enquiry also disclosed that the whole building chain had worked as close to the limits as possible, so as to reduce costs. Paul Andreu denounced the building companies for having not correctly prepared the reinforced concrete.
Paris CDG 2005 was developed by sim-wings and is available for downloading from SimMarket (www.simmarket.com), who supplied the product for review) for Euro 19.95. At a mere 15Mb the download is quite quick, a welcome surprise when you compare it to what it actually has to offer. Once installed it takes up about 80Mb, which again won't kill your hard disk. Like many add-on's lately it automatically create a 'before' scenery.cfg file so that if you discover any problems you can easily revert back to the old configuration. I have found this extremely useful when trying to debug problems, if I have forgotten to make backups.
The manual can be found in your All Programs/Aerosoft folder, and here you can find a number of key items, including: the frequencies for various animations as well as locations for many hidden delights. It gives you the essentials of how to get your scenery working, as well as a few tips on how to get the best frame rates. I have never been one for reading a manual thoroughly before using an add-on, but in practicality, it does save you a few headaches. This time however I would strongly recommend you take a note of a number of things. Firstly, the location of the different aircraft stands and their various frequencies. I spent a while trying to find where Aer Lingus parked, but to no avail.
My initial impressions of the scenery were good, I loved the great detail in the ground texturing as well as the wonderful models of the terminal buildings. In comparison with the UK2000 scenery, the airbridges are a lot more attractive, and from what I have seen at Terminal 1, there's a lot more that are fully functional. However, if you wish to have just static air bridges you can download a patch from the authors (sim-wings) website at www.sim-wings.com. This I was especially pleased with as I am now accustomed to wandering around UK airports looking for a gate that has a functional airbridge. The only complaint I will make though in the case of the airbridges, is the way that they are coded. Each "pod" of Terminal 1 has a frequency, you tune that frequency to activate those airbridges, but 3 move at once, I shall go into more detail on this subject later.
All the ground textures look very realistic, like you're almost there, they include great little taxiway lights and very easily readable markings. CAT III and CAT I hold markers are all over the place as you approach the runways, when I took out my ground charts for Paris (available from the French Aviation website www.sia.aviation-civile.gouv.fr or for those of you without a good command of the French language, Eurocontrol) I realised that all the holds are in the correct places, which adds to the realism even more. You can appreciate the ground layout work even more when climbing out of Paris, where you can also see the (albeit limited) photographic scenery. All these vivid textures only come into view when you are considerably close to them. I found that when I landed on one of the runways, the other end of the runway would remain out of focus, this is a feature used my developers to increase performance, and in my opinion it is a reasonable one. When taxing around the airport you will see a considerable amount of static aircraft, the models of these are not great but from a distance, they do the job perfectly. For those of you who have AI traffic (I am more of a VATSIM person) you should not run into any problems with these static aircraft taking up stands belonging to your traffic. I am under the impression that the stands available to the AI are only those without static aircraft. I have not gotten around to trying removing these static aircraft, but by the looks of things you can just take out the 'staticaircraft.bgl' file and also the 'static-fedex.bgl' file will get rid of the aircraft parked on the Cargo Apron. You will also notice at the northern part of the airport, a number of taxiway bridges over the motorways feeding into and around the airport. When I saw one of the added features of this I went off the taxiway in shock, I didn't expect to look out my left and see cars coming towards me! Yes that's right, you have fully animated cars, trucks and busses constantly going around the airport. You can sit and watch the traffic whizzing about the road around Terminals, and on the motorway when taxiing over it.
When on the approach to the airport you might be guessing if there is something wrong with the scenery, as I was at one stage. All the textures are quite blurred until you are really on top of them, which is a benefit in itself. If you were flying around Paris, but don't go too close to the airport (CDG) then you won't be affected at all by the scenery. You are warned in the manual that you might see buildings appear very suddenly, I found that this was more of a gradual build up, instead of a building appearing in the middle of an apparently open apron right in front of you. Dotted around the airport are a number of features (some I have not got round to trying out yet), which are activated by a number of frequencies. All of them are de-activated my tuning in any other frequency. The only problem I had with this feature was with the PSS A320 panel where I cannot for the life of me get the aircraft to keep 1 frequency tuned on the ground, so I can dock at the air bridge to offload the passengers!
Anyway, first on the list of these features is the Marshaller, who will guide you onto your stand by tuning in 111.00 on NAV2, it is quite useful and again compares to the UK2000 scenery where on a select number of stands, a Marshaller is available, but this scenery does one better again by giving you a Marshaller on every stand. You would miss the automated version though. At Terminal 1, you can control the airbridges by tuning in the appropriate frequency which goes from 111.10 to 111.70 in respective order; once again you tune this into the NAV2 radio. There is a gate at each area for a 737, 767, and 747. According to the manual, you can fit any appropriate aircraft onto those stands, like an A32X at the 737 Stand and so on. At Terminal 2, it's a whole different story. There is a vast amount of stands and different frequencies to choose from. Again the above (A32X will fit at a 737 Stand) applies across the board. This time the aircraft vary from the A320 to the 747. Last but certainly not least, if you have any technical problems and are able to taxi your aircraft to the Maintenance Hanger, you can activate the Hangar door by tuning the appropriate frequency. You have a total of 4 to choose from, and they can take up to 20 seconds to open/close. Again, in comparison to other packages, this scenery is well ahead.
All in all, I think that this is a great package. You can appreciate what is on offer here by comparing it with other highly sought after add-on software; in my case I compared it with the excellent UK2000 scenery. The countless number of extra features will leave you exploring the airport for some time, it will bring the realism of flying into Paris to a new level. At the time of writing, it is only available by download from www.simmarket.com and www.aerosoft-shop.com.
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