(Note: I dithered about where to put this. If a Community Manager decides it would be better as a bug report, I’ll be relieved that someone knows better than I.)
Having moaned about the lack of default helipads and heliports in the sim in another post, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to look at the World Map to see if I was right.
So I set my World Map filters to:
Everything off (in particular third-party content) except:
MAP
Background map: IFR (makes it easier to spot airfields)
AIRPORTS
Airports: ON
(needs to be on for subcategories to show)
Heliports: ON
HELIPORTS
Heliports: ON*
When I looked at the World Map, I was struck by how the default (i.e. not STARRED) heliports occurred in clusters.
I particularly noticed a cluster of six in Germany:
All showed as heliports till I zoomed in past 3NM on the World Map. But as the location details resolved themselves, it became clear that only some of them had helipads: to be exact, only two had helipads and the other four had not, e.g. Oppin doesn’t:
Selecting the heliports from more than 3NM out (i.e. not specifying a location within them), I could do a hot start on helipads on the two that had them, but was dumped cold and dark on seemingly random locations (possibly the centre of the airfields?) on the other four.
So it seems that not everything that shows up as a default heliport on World Map actually has helipads. Is this generally true?
Well, there aren’t so many default heliport locations on the World Map that’s it’s yet impossible to check them all. So I did. (I’m not saying I didn’t miss any or get any wrong, but I did try not to.)
These airports show as heliports but don’t actually have any helipads:
AYMR
EDAP
EDAQ
EDCD
EDUZ
ENAT
KEGV
KFIN
KIOW
KLAN
LIAP
ULMK
VABJ
VABV
VARK
VEAB
VEBD
VEBG
VEMH
VIDD
VIHR
VOHY
VOWA
WADB
I’m guessing - partly from the way, as I say, that default heliports good and bad tend to cluster - that this has something to do with the new World Hub. But I’m not a scenery designer and know nothing about that.
Except that something does seem to be going wrong.
*No idea why heliports need two entries under Filters, but I did notice that the Needles helipad (not heliport) would appear under Airfields/Heliports, but the London Heliport would only show up if I turned on Heliports/Heliports.