Allow Deletion of Closed (non-existent) Airports via 'World Hub'

Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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29

That’s a feature that ONLY makes sense if it’s an option on the user side of the sim. Guess what? It is, you can set an airfield to closed within the sim files. So why would an user need to close this airfield to anyone else? Makes no sense to me.

As an example, I enjoy flying historical routes with airportsand navaids that no longer exist. I bet many others do the same and would be very distraught if someone removed those navaids and airfields because they “don’t want old stuff” there and it’s not realistic.

This is a shallowly thought feature that would only hinder other people’s enjoyment of the sim by removing features for all users that could be removed clientside without problems.

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30

Is it possible to implement the setting of a flag for a historical field (or any other scenery object/navaid) and even further, set a closing date? That way, you can roll back the date in the sim and certain items will appear? Same with an opening date, so certain scenery won’t appear prior to that.

I’d love to shoot some approaches to Stapleton, but I don’t want to see it if I’m simming in “real” time.

Honestly, this whole notion of historical airports presents a bit of a headache in implementation, that is if you’re shooting for accuracy.

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31

I’m not hoping to hinder anyone’s enjoyment of the sim, but I also don’t see many people complaining when the Bing Maps aerial imagery is updated to be more recent (removing old features), or a city’s photogrammetry is updated (replacing old, knocked-down buildings with new), or when navdata is updated so old beacons or frequencies may disappear. Navigraph users even update their data still further. But airports?! Hell no! We can only add, but never take away?!

Yes, I can set an airport to ‘closed’ by editing the sceneries; I found out how to do it above. But I can’t cover the whole world, hence the community effort. But you’d all rather have bogus data in your sims, with airports on the world map that haven’t been there for 20 years. Just a perfectly surfaced runway in the middle of an industrial estate and autogen buildings. Or an airport you can’t find because it’s invisible runway (often used on grass strips) runs through a car park. Sure… if that’s what you enjoy :wink:

Look, the community can (and does) create historical airfields so anybody can add them - usually for free - to their sim. Be it ancient airfields, wartime airfields, closed airfields (Meigs, Kai Tak being popular ones) or your small, local airfield, it’s all possible.

For me, where a runway has been left to rot, or the surface is being broken up and reclaimed by nature, or covered with buildings or parked cars, I would like to see that replicated in the sim. I can only do that by removing the ‘stuck-on runway’ that covers up the Bing Maps aerials, making a damaged run look pristine and new. If the airport could be feasibly flown to/from, it makes sense to leave it open. If the runway was ripped up, I’d like to get those updates in my sim as standard. Like we do for everything else…

To the last post above, having a historical slider like Google Earth is a massive undertaking, I wouldn’t even hope for that as not enough data would exist. That said, with the World Hub, people may submit airports in different year configurations, so you could choose the version you want to add to your sim. Maybe even - here’s a crazy idea - the current 2024 version of an airport. The version where it’s been built on and no longer exists. Insanity, I know. :laughing:

TL;DR for whole thread:
Would be nice if the community could help keep the whole world up-to-date in line with what Asobo are doing with World Updates, including both improving and adding airports, AND closing/removing old airports. The community folder allows anybody to do their own thing; adding or removing content to their specific requirements. So nothing is truly forced on anyone.

Edit to include definition of the World Hub from the latest newsletter (bold emphasis is my own):

For those unaware, the World Hub is an upcoming tool which will allow any Microsoft Flight Simulator player (i.e. YOU!) to submit corrections and updates to any default airport so that they better match their real-world counterparts.

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32

Unfortunately, you’ve created backlash by poorly marketing your idea (even though I agree with basic point). People dislike losing what they already have, worse when it’s removed from them.

Rather than delete airfields, create a suppression file to be uploaded and continually expanded upon to the upcoming World Hub. The file would contain exclusions for the out-of-date airfield elements for anyone who specifically downloads it for a more up-to-date flight sim experience.
And for those flight simmers who want to retain historical airfields, nothing changes for them.

Your arguments are sound. It’s weird to see airfields like EGLG on the MSFS map when it’s been closed for a decade. I think it looks terrible when the underlying Bing imagery shows new land use and a taxiway/runway element cuts across the imagery of buildings.

And it’s not as if historical airfields are forgotten. Off the top of my head, there are three versions of Meigs Field and two of Hong Kong Kai Tak. Perhaps those who were quick to shoot down your point had shallowly thought out viewpoints of their own?

33

This has been an interesting read. I have no idea how this “world hub” will work, but personally, I’d like to have the option to install these airport changes or not (based upon my personal flying preferences), just like I had the option to install the world & city updates (or parts of them) after I initially downloaded the standard edition. I could imagine a scenario where I could choose to download a “UK Airports Update” (for example) in its entirety, or a number of individual airports of my choosing that are within the pack or choose not to download the package at all.

I’d also like to know what their on-disk size would be, as well as their effect on initial load times & in-flight performance. :face_with_peeking_eye:

34

The only problem with his idea is leaving the agency to remove airports to random users. That’s the only real problem with it. As long as it’s an optional client side feature it should be fine.

It is indeed annoying to have the sim render an airfield in the middle of a new settlement or neighborhood, but it may be equally annoying to others have existing airfields that you enjoy using removed by the will of other users.

About the discontinued nav aids mentioned in OP’s reply to me I believe there’s a market for add-ons that add historical navaids to the sim, specially when more old-school jets are released.

35

Thanks all for your continued input, some good points put forwards.

The World Hub is designed to allow the community to enhance default airports, using default tools and objects. To this end, I don’t imagine it will really increase the disk footprint at all, as it will only be referencing existing assets. For the small airstrips, I look forward to seeing people add parking spaces so it’s not necessary to spawn in the runway, engine running.

Except for those that want an airport locked in to its historical layout, I think everyone agrees the World Hub is a good idea. All those neglected airfields can be refreshed to match the scenery, have their runway numbers corrected, runways added/removed, hangars placed appropriately, or whichever adjustments are needed.

Hopefully on balance, once one gets over the initial ‘shock’ from my suggestion, most people can see it’s also a good thing to cleanse the truly non-existent airports. Sure, my marketing needs some work… I get that :upside_down_face: I maintain that it won’t be possible for ‘randos’ to remove airports. It will be moderated OR optional, or both.

If we have to ‘subscribe’ to every airfield correction, it will be a painful process to adopt people’s updates across the world. Regional updates could be good. But where 5 people submit corrections to the same airport, I’m not sure how the ‘winner’ would be determined, in terms of whose update becomes the standard for people to download within a region.

I certainly love flying vintage aircraft and agree that having a way to introduce historical or traditional navigation beacons and systems would be welcome. Perhaps a small audience, so likely one for the community to work on.

36

Yes. While a region/continent set of airport exclusions in one download is probably too much to ask, country-sized ones would likely be more manageable and less likely to have errors.

I also think there’s a much larger audience for this than might appear at a glance.
JustFlight’s BAe 146, Fokkers, and eventually 747 Classic, FSLabs’ Concorde, etc. All retro airliners that need a plethora of VORs and NDBs to enjoy them fully.

Something to support that view is a post I came across just yesterday. Even though I’m not a massive fan of retro flying, I’d quite like to see a retro AI traffic pack. Fingers crossed something comes of it!

https://retroai.proboards.com/post/31660/

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37

The World Hub Alpha sign-up page says:

“The World Hub Alpha will allow users to easily edit and change default airports in Microsoft Flight Simulator.”

OK, so I can modify a default airport to better meet my particular preferences - perhaps by adding a building, removing a tree, changing an AI taxiway path, removing or re-aligning a runway, etc. This sounds good, but it does not mention any ability to share my changes with anyone else. It that mentioned in another post somewhere?

38

Having followed old posts and all of the Dev Q&As, it’s quite clear that its main purpose is to allow community submissions to improve the world. It is NOT a simplified airport editor. You’ll need to use the existing tools as now, and submit your scenery to the World Hub system. Maybe they’ll enhance the tools, but I don’t believe that’s the point of it at all.

If you’re familiar with X-Plane, they have a very similar system where users can submit airport changes. They are either voted on or moderated to some extent, and a given user submission eventually gets included in a future simulator update as default scenery, so everyone benefits (except those people who enjoy historic layouts perhaps - as evidenced in this thread!).

With a quick search I was able to find these notes from the Dev Q&A, in respect to the purpose of World Hub:

Yeah I’m excited to see this I think this is the way to go crowdsourcing these types of information is the only way to really get the world accurate.

From:

There may be further details in other dev stream transcriptions.

Or there’s the original wishlist thread for some light reading :grin:

So in summary, I believe the ‘good’ submissions, which pass whatever kind of vetting process they implement, will be included in the base simulator as improvements on the airports generated from their original data sources.

39

Just quoting myself here to say that the above seems accurate based on today’s Dev Q&A.

Approved (moderated) airport improvements will be added into the base simulator monthly, along with the Navblue updates. So get ready for those kind “internet randos” messing up your simulators… just like those Asobo/Gaya randos do with your sim and world updates… just try to see that they are all working to make your sim better for you :slight_smile:

Screenshot from the Twitch stream:

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image1435×444 65.6 KB

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40

I listened to the DevStream too. I get Mr Neumann’s point of getting the flight community to build out the world - MS/AS cannot hand-craft every airport in the world.

But I’m still concerned about these monthly mandatory airport updates. Mr. Neumann did not go into specifics about how all of this will work, possibly because there may be many changes based upon what they see during the world hub alpha.

I suppose a lot will depend on the number of personnel tasked to review submissions, the rules & processes that determine how accurate the proposed changes to the current airport are, and the expertise of the reviewers in ensuring that the changes are, indeed, accurate.

It will be interesting to see what happens when you tried to load a saved flight at an airport that has been modified. For example: My saved flight has me parked at a spot at the airport that is, post update, now in the middle of a hanger / terminal / building. Yikes! :scream:

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41

Yes, good points, even if similar risks exist today with the World Updates which come with improved airports - not just the hand-crafted monsters, but basic layout updates to other airports in the region. Sure, you can choose not to install those, but I dare say most users do not worry too much about side-effects when they click ‘install’.

I’ve never been in the habit of loading up saved flights, I just pick a start location from the map (and as close to where I finished last time as I can). That does mean I struggle to start off-runway on small airfields with no parking spaces, but I get by. Since we have no traditional ‘File > Save’ menu like in FSX and earlier, it didn’t occur to me to try to save a flight to come back to, to be honest… :upside_down_face: (and I would never save mid-flight; feels like a recipe for disaster with complex add-ons).

From the dev stream, it seems that World Hub submissions from users cannot (yet) add any objects from the sim library to the airfields, so I’m guessing it will just be runway, taxiway and configuration changes for now - hopefully windsock placement is possible though! If users cannot add appropriate objects like buildings it will be a shame, but on the flip side, some users might litter airports with hundreds of objects to breathe life into a place, but end up overdoing it. So maybe it’s a sensible way to start and further streamlines the review process.

42

I’ve mentioned it before, but for a good example of a system like this working well, we only have to look at XPlane’s Scenery Gateway. They’ve been using a system like this for a decade, and it works very well for them. MSFS just needs an equivelant system, maybe with some inspiration drawn from there.

43

Indeed it’s impossible to add or alter library objects in the World Hub, which is a shame and lowers motivation to use it at all. In the end, scenery building is a reminiscence of good old days playing with Lego bricks. :grin:

44

I don’t agree with this suggestion. What does it matter if closed airfields still exist, just ignore them.

There are at least 2 bush trips in the sim that have been broken because the airfields have been removed and Asobo didn’t replace the closed airfield with another one meaning you can’t get past a certain stage.

Also it’s possible to set the date back in the sim to when the airfield was open so unless the appearance of scenery can be altered based on a certain operational date then it should be there always.

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45

I take your points and they are valid, but as for “what does it matter”, I gave some equally valid reasons in the first post :slight_smile:

It’s easy to say “just ignore”, but when you set up your flight and travel somewhere, only to find it’s not ‘landable’ or even visible, and/or you’re a user working with external applications that have tasked you to fly from/to that airfield, it becomes a problem - and one that could easily be fixed.

Everything in MSFS is being updated, except the airport data (until now, thanks to the World Hub). In time, as more smaller airfields may close, I don’t want ever-growing numbers of invalid places to fly to/from left on the map. If I really want them back for nostalgia, well, that’s where community add-ons come in.

To the Bush Trips, also a good point, but many of those were broken since around SU3 for other reasons. I gave up on them after the progress would get stuck. I know they’ve made efforts to fix but I don’t want to go back and restart, especially now the HUD is forced on for external view (ruins the enjoyment of taking screenshots).