Agua Caliente Springs Airport serves residents of rural east San Diego County and visitors to Agua Caliente Hot Springs County Park. It’s located 95 miles east of San Diego. The airfield looks like a blacktop field next to a two-lane desert highway in the middle of nowhere. Approach runway 11 is challenging and weather permit it’s highly recommended to land on runway 29.
Agua Caliente has only one runway 11/29 with 2500 x 60 feet (762 x 18 meters). Wind permitting use of runway 29 for landing and runway 11 for departure recommended due to a 460 feet hill 1/2 mile west of the airport. Right Pattern runway 29. Left pattern runway 11. Frequency: aircraft shall self announced on CTAF prior to landing or departure. Runway 11/29 closed Sunset-Sunrise; Not lighted.
Sad news. Here’s why flight simulator are useful: the real Agua Caliente is officially closed for a while. The runway has large fissures and places where the soil was bubbling beneath the asphalt. It seems to be a million dollar operation. Very possibly we’ll see the NOTAM “!SAN 02/026 L54 AD AP CLSD 2402061855-2408312359” renewed. So… Enjoy Agua Caliente in MSFS!*
Sad news for us virtual aviators and real-world dreamers. Agua Caliente (L54), the quiet little desert strip many of us have fond memories of, has now officially faded from the map. The airport has been closed for over a year, and last week, the County confirmed that resurfacing the runway was too costly. They’ve requested it be unregistered by the FAA - permanently closed.
It stings. For those of us who’ve flown in and out of L54 in the sim or in person, it’s more than just a runway - it’s a chapter of aviation history being quietly erased. We could keep it alive in our imaginations, fly in as if the yellow crosses don’t exist… Or we can let the virtual world reflect reality and say goodbye properly.
Another good example of why it would be good (IMO) for MSFS to incorporate the concept of eras into the core code of the game. This would allow us to easily fly in the era of our choice, with the appropriate aircraft, airports, scenery & navigation aids of the period. This has been discussed in a number of topics, e.g.:
Unfortunately, the Wishlist only has 43 votes in over 3 years, so this concept is unlikely ever to be implemented.
I think it would be amazing to be able to switch between the modern world and historical eras. But unfortunately, it just seems like an impossible task. The amount of content needed to make it work well would be insane and for most parts of the world impossible to obtain.
For individual projects like L54, I guess we could still use the older addon if we wanted to have the historical version in our sims. Some people will want the world to reflect the most up-to-date reality and some want to recreate a different time. But I also wouldn’t expect the OP to have to continue supporting the older addon versions, so I’m happy to have any rendition of it.
Not impossible, but a lot of work. Some can - and is - being done by dedicated volunteers, e.g.:
For developers of pay-ware, this would not only open up another revenue stream, but creation of older scenery might often (but not always) be easier & quicker, as - for example - airports of bygone eras were generally smaller & less complex than todays modern counterparts.
Even realignment of terrain and rivers to their historical channels is possible in 2024, and has already been done by the developers of Hadrian’s wall, as discussed in the video linked in this topic:
You’re right that it can be done for individual projects and I support these. Some of the work people are doing already is very encouraging.
While you could have a set of historical airfields, the landscape in between will still be the modern built-up world. I would love to recreate historical cross-country flights using pilotage and landmarks that no longer exist. If someone figures out how to crack that, it would be amazing.
Whilst it is not exactly what you are after, you might be interested in our Arrows Across America project which has reconstructed 4500 miles of US Air Mail navigation routes for the late 1920s.
We have placed arrow and beacon markers in their correct locations every ten miles along the Contract Air Mail (CAM) routes, along with historically accurate Intermediate Landing Fields (ILFs).
For some of the ILFs we have had to remove the modern world (in one case a golf course) to place them.
Just to follow up on this, the SDK does offer significant potential for landscape changes, in our case Hadrian’s Wall includes over 5,000 individual edits from removing individual farms to bulldozing eleven miles of Newcastle upon Tyne.
I have been asked whether we could recreate the whole of Roman Britain, which is possible in theory but I think would require some kind of Blackshark style AI algorithm to be remotely cost effective.
We are also exploring how we might create a “Romano British biome” to edit the landscape flora to make it more accurate.
Ironically, one of our biggest challenges has been to the continued improvement of the DEM and landscape data. For a seventy three mile Wall this has been disruptive enough and so at a wider landscape level would be significant hurdle to overcome unless the historical landscape was baked into the core sim as an option.
We are waiting the arrival of 2024’s landscape in 2020 on July 1st with trepidation as it will involve some sections of the Wall being rebuilt for the fifth time…
While there definitely is a community of vintage prop-heads who appreciate to have yet another layer of immersion (i.e. correct historical navaids) for their flights of the past (and I am one of them), there is just no market for historical navaids payware packages.
The 1958 mod on fs.to has got just 268 downloads (as there was no update, these are pretty much unique downloads) since its release in March 2024.
If the package sold for 10 eur and everyone purchsed it, I would earn not even 2000 eur (shops take usually around 30%). Which translates to some 6 eur per hour if I calculate with a very conservative estimate of some 300 hours put into the mod (but likely considerably more than that).
Therefore I think such packages will be produced by motivated individuals (or fools like me ) as freeware, if ever.
Finally, I have decided to re-activate the open version of Agua Caliente Thanks to a flightsim.to feature, two .zip files are available to choose on the addon’s page. The main file (1), labelled “Download Now” displays Agua Caliente in MSFS without the big yellow X marking. An alternative file (2) can be downloaded if you want the X marking on the runway closing it.
) as freeware, if ever.
