KVLL PAPI Lights Showing Incorrect Glideslope

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Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it?

No, i have tested without dev mode

Have you disabled/removed all your mods and addons? If the issue still occurs with no mods and add-ons, please continue to report your issue. If not, please move this post to the User Support Hub.

yes i have tested with no mods

Brief description of the issue:

When landing at KVLL Oakland/Troy Airport, The papi lights are incorrect, they are not 2 light papi like some documents on the airport suggest, and are instead 4 light papi, and also cause an incorrect glideslope causing you to land a bit more than halfway down the runway.

Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:

image

ICAO or coordinates (DevMode > Debug > Display position)

KVLL 42.543192 -83.180806

Detailed steps to reproduce the issue encountered:

Play on any recent version of the game, on steam msfs 2020, and view the papi lights, which are incorrect

PC specs and/or peripheral set up if relevant:

irrelevant

Build Version # when you first started experiencing this issue:

1.38.2.0


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Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?

Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:

If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:

1 Like

NOTE: The papi is incorrect on both sides of the runway

A bunch of issues here. First, PAPI at default AI rendered airports are almost always set at around 1000’ down the runway. In reality, they’re anywhere from 200 to 1400’, but definitely average toward the lower end on shorter runways like this. In this case, it should be around 800’ for runway “9,” which would give a slightly lower threshold crossing height and more useable runway landing beyond.

Second, you’re right, it should be a P2R rather than a P4L for runway 10. It should be a P2L on runway 28, at 650’ down the runway.

The lighting database the AI-built airports were pulled from is from the late 2000s, so there’s a lot of discrepancies like that. Many VASI have been since upgraded to PAPI, and the sim just doesn’t “get” 2-box PAPI units correct very often.

Third, it looks like it hasn’t taken into account the change in magnetic variation, and the runway number looks to be 9/27 instead of 10/28.

Fourth, the threshold stripes are one each side of the centerline, when it should be two. This is another common error - they don’t scale correctly to runway width as prescribed in standards.

Fifth, the runway numbers are hilariously small. They should be 60’ tall and they’re maybe 20’ tall here. This is a common error found at most US airports with narrow runways - numbers should not scale down unless the runway width prevents a 2’ gap between the number and the edges/edge markings, which has to be a pretty narrow runway in combination with a two-digit number. This is not the case at VLL and they should be full size.

Sixth, the paved stopway has been deleted and is now just grass.

Stuff like this is what we fixed in the World Hub. Hope we can get to it again. They still need to either fix or enable us to fix/manually scale the threshold marks and runway numbers (along with touchdown zone marks), though.

2 Likes

Hoping they take this in account for msfs2024