I enjoy looking at the custom airports, cities and other add ons that show (almost) photo realistic scenery. My question is, how do you use these add ons? For instance, an airport. How often do you visit the same airport and walk around looking at the details? Do you role play/pretend? What do you do? How often?
Personally, I would check out all the details in an airport only once. Thereafter, I might land/takeoff again but not often. And I wouldn’t necessarily explore the airport while there. Likewise, for cities, I would do a chopper tour to explore the details up close but, probably only once. I may or may not fly over the city again unless it’s on a flight path to somewhere else.
So, I’m curious how others use these add ons.
I don’t have many custom airfields but my home base EHTE ( check on flightsim.to) is my favourite.
Simply taking it for a short spin over and around the region.
Works great in 2020 and 2024 btw.
Happy 
Personally I use a lot of 3rd party add-ons, some big airports some small. I don’t necessarily explore the scenery but it’s nice to have a higher quality visuals when on the airport. It’s pretty much just having better visuals for me. If the default airports were high quality, I probably wouldn’t use 3rd party add-ons.
I use addon linker to organize and enable/disable all my add-ons, this way if I want to fly Miami to Boston I can go in and enable my Miami airport, Miami city, and Boston Airport. So my departure and arrival look better.
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I land and take off from them, that’s about it. There is nothing else to do.
For me, it comes down to getting a ‘real’ view of an airport when I fly in or out of there. Default airports are bland to a level that detracts from the experience. Real airports are alive, dirty, noisy and often act as a cultural entry point. For airports I’ve visited in real life I want that instant recognition which defines it as different from any other airport.
Really, any improvement over default airports is worthwhile, even using default terminals/buildings/objects etc. However as a former scenery developer I know that building a custom airport is more than just making it more realistic, we want it to be as realistic as possible, so we may as well make it all real, even the bits which you normally wouldn’t see from your cockpit when you park there.
Interiors are a big issue for some people, and I normally wouldn’t want or need the interior modelled, whereas the exterior is required to define a particular airport, interiors tend to be rather soul-crushing in their sameness, so I’d never ‘walk’ around a terminal interior.
However if I pull up to a jetway within metres of a glass-fronted terminal, then I want to see what’s inside.
Many users may not ever see the entire extent of a custom airport, so you’d need to weigh up the cost – in cash, or performance – for something which someone has poured months of work into.
I like to have higher quality visuals. It’s very, very helpful on networks such as VATSIM and PilotEdge.
Especially when getting taxi instructions, my home airports taxiways are mostly mislabeled on the default airport. So taxi instructions could be confusing if you’re just using the game visuals