So I have always been a history buff, and I love flying in the Caribbean. I’ve always wondered what the islands must have been like 70 or 80 years ago when they were harder to get to, more unspoiled. I got talking to a similarly like-minded friend and flight sim enthusiast. and came up with an idea that I lack the know-how to do. I thought perhaps someone (or a group of people) that does/do know how to do these things might be interested.
A lot of the airports around the Caribbean started out as US military airfields in the 1940s. There were essentially dirt strips. In fact, one person has already created one of them for MSFS:
So the amazing thing about MSFS is we could literally recreate eras. And in the case of these old airfields from say, the 1940s, 50s, or 60s (many of the fields would have been the same throughout those periods), many of them were just dirt strips, or in any event very, very simple. For example, this is the forerunner to St. Maarten’s Princess Juliana International Airport circa 1950:
So imagine having downloadable packages of eras: the Caribbean in the 1950s, for example. I for one think that would be pretty cool!
What say ye? And as I said, I think developmentally and creatively, it wouldn’t be very difficult.
My home airport in the 1930’s would be on Swan Island instead of where PDX is today (Portland, Oregon/google Portland for Swan Island). Swan Island is a Marine Repair and warehousing/manufacturing location today.
That reminds me. Vancouver, Washington (just across the Columbia river) has one of the oldest continuously operated airport west of the Mississippi. A dirigible landed there in 1905. It hasn’t changed much since the 50’s, but go back a few more decades
Wow! What an awesome idea! What would be really neat is if we could get Asobo to put a date variable in the scenery, so specific scenery elements can be optionally made date specific. Then you could set your flight date to the 50’s and all of your 50s airports would be active, and set your date back to today and every thing is back to modern. Scenery designers could even use it for simpler things, such as only during December there are Christmas lights, only on October 31 there are halloween decorations, stuff like that. But I love your idea of the 50’s and 40s vintage scenery!!
Why not? I mean honestly, think about it, most of them were grass or dirt with field tents. That’s the thing, it’s not like recreating a modern airport with a terminal by some famous architect. The one on St. Maarten is essentially a rectangular wooden house.
I’m not sure if they have one for Lincoln Nebraska’s airport yet, but that airport is a very famous airport and an early United Airlines stop plus Charles Lindbergh trained to fly at that airport
One of my locals is KBCT, which was an old B-17 base back in those times. Now the old runways are parking lots for Florida Atlantic University. On some parts of the university grounds, in real life, you can still see the ruins of old WWII structures.
Even since FSX, I have been dreaming of a “dial-a-decade” feature. My passion is civil aviation between 1930 and 1970. To have the airports and navaids of the time would be fabulous, but probably not commercially viable.
I was born in Croydon’s Mayday hospital, it was named that because Croydon Airport back in the day invented the runway and…
French pilots in distress would be shouting it…
Yeah… In 1923 according to Google, is when they called it Mayday Hospital…
They’ve since my birth renamed it Croydon University Hospital giving Croydon a university because it had no qualifying university or cathedral to become a city despite 3 times bidding for city status to make it another city in London.
Croydon Airport, I took the tour as a child, my maternal grandmother WAAF veteran was into aeroplanes, she took me as a child.
I got to sit in the aeroplane outside on that tour too as that was included in the tour.
Even though it was anchored to the ground, I still selt some turbilance.
Whatever plane this plane is, I don’t know what make or model or age this thing is, it still stands there proud today…
I’ve been in, sat down, (the whole tour did), was fun.
I guess I was 10.
