As far as default ones in the sim, one of my favorites was EGCB (Barton). It was my first landing in England as I had crossed over from Greenland to Scotland, then through Ireland and Wales.
I picked EGCB since much of my family came from Manchester. As I first flew over I was in a bit of disbelief it was an airport. But it was very British looking!
As far as Heathrow goes, I was a little disappointed.
Anyway, I never expected this thread to take so many interesting turns.
Manchester Barton is great, I love the little children’s playground there.
The Inibuilds Heathrow is much better than the Asobo one, although it’s always going to be a gigantic, sprawling, ugly monolith of concrete.
If you’re still in England now and you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend downloading the free Duxford Air Museum and Airport from flightsim.to, link below;
https://flightsim.to/file/28581/egsu-duxford-airfield-complete-edition
It is absolutely jaw dropping, staggeringly good. If you have a VR headset you can easily spend an hour just walking around, visiting the memorials, then tanks, the planes, it is better than almost any payware I’ve seen.
What makes it the more incredible, is that it is the developers only ever scenery. He’s one and done, said this was favourite airfield in realife and he wanted to recreate it perfectly but has no interest in making any others.
Lol, I parked and my first thought was, “Is that a playground in front of me?!” It’s an Asobo airport too. So it’s unusual to see that level of personalization. Finding the runway from parking can be a bit tough since it’s all grass.
How are you doing your VR walkaround? I have a hard time with the drone camera, especially in VR. VR really needs a basic transport mode.
I think the disappointment in Heathrow was just the monolithic concrete design like you mentioned. It’s built with the aesthetics of a military base. At least in the sim it feels that way. Just a short hop over, Charles de Gaulle was quite stunning.
I have 6 more locations to visit in England, so I’ll add that one too. Seems nearly every airport has content. My hometown airport is rather large in comparison to many of these but has no 3rd party content.
I use an Xbox controller for the drone cam, works great in VR, wireless, well worth getting one if you haven’t got one. It’s super easy to change speeds. and spin around with it.
You have to visit Duxford, it’s the home of the Spitfire, there’s all kinds of military planes, tanks, armoured vehicles. There’s even red phone boxes, you can’t get more quintessentially English. There’s two download options, the one I’ve linked to is the best version, but you can also download optional people, it literally turns it into an airshow with hundreds of people everywhere.
There’s a decent video here, and it’s had even more added to it now.
If you’re looking to get more out of the uk I would suggest taking a look at Neil’s farm strips. There’s a mix of payware and freeware available. Each payware volume comes with around 20 airports for $10.
https://store.flightsim.com/product/neils-tours-uk-farm-strips-vol-1-for-msfs/
Thanks for the excellent overview. Any chance you would make your Google Map publicly readable? No worries at all if you’d rather not.
I have mixed feelings about these. It’s awesome that he has covered so many small airstrips that nobody else has done. On the hand, many of them are made purely from his imagination, and they often have a rather cartoonish feel. A big drawback for me is that he’s not prepared to listen to requests to put his models in a library, which means that you end up with hundreds of random file cluttering your community folder.
All that said, I’m probably going to end up picking up a few volumes.
Interesting comment about the cartoonish feel - I didn’t know or see that.
yes I think Duxford takes the cake for me…
In several of the ones I’ve seen, there are bright blue, yellow and red objects randomly scattered around - cars, tractors, etc. I don’t mean to be overly critical, though - they’re all better than the default scenery, in which it’s often difficult to even make out the runway.
He even has bears in some of his scenery!
If you like farm strips and don’t want to pay, SAC Designs on flightsim.to has made a bunch in the UK. They are fairly simple, using stock sim ssets along with UK2000 free models kit but certainly good enough to be enjoyable and a lot better than default, and they are super small file size downloads.
His user name on the site is amb7364 here’s his collection so far,
Do they add parking spaces? I hate starting powered up.
Another interesting observation, Ireland reminds me of the Appalachians in the US, at least once you get of the eastern coast and into the interior and west. It’s likely all the town names. But I’ve heard that the isolated nature of many of the small Appalachian towns come from Irish immigrants that settled there.
Yes, I do follow him and his scenery is really nice. I don’t object to paying and would probably even buy some of Neil’s if he would be a bit more flexible in his dealings with people.
He sounds like an artist! 
In his last post on flightsim.to , he stormed off, declaring he was never going to upload to that site again!
LOL, I get it.
You pour a portion of your life into creating something and then have people get angry, tear it apart, expect more, etc. It’s probably worse if you get paid for it as then you are obliged to forever fix and support it.
That’s the crux of developing a consumer facing product which I think a lot of creators fail to grasp.
It isn’t just about releasing one product after another but a continuation of support combined with marketing, bug fixes and free updates for the products lifecycle, not to mention the social media hyping and all that lovely toxic stuff.
Developers can’t just take the money and hide.
Caernarfon - please 
Personally if I was to charge for one of my add-on’s I would make sure it was in a relatively complete/well done product as I could before release. Would also expect to at least provide updates to sort bugs out to allow it’s continued use. You also kind of have to have a thick skin and expect bigger expectation of the add-on if someone has paid for it. especially as usually no free preview of these add-ons before you buy
But if it’s free its totally up to the dev to decide to make future updates or not.
Constructive criticism and suggestions are welcome by me personally as I want to release best add-on I can to my abilities.