New World Update --> US National Parks & Monuments - July 4th!

My preference is they not add airports that don’t exist irl. However, most of the parks in the sim have an airport within 10-20 miles of some part of the park boundary. Grand Teton is fairly unique in that there is a commercial airport within the park boundaries, at Jackson Hole (KJAC), only a few miles from the barn. This airport was upgraded significantly for this WU, but I’m not aware of any other airports that were.

However, other POIs (similar to the barn) within the parks are often dozens of miles from an airport. Some of the parks are thousands of square miles, so understandably these places can get quite remote.

Otherwise, to land close to most of these POIs or other remote locations in the sim, you’ll need to use a helicopter or another VTOL aircraft, or chance it with a conventional aircraft, maybe selecting one with large tires and STOL capability. The good news is it’s just a sim and while landing off-airport can be rough, there are no real consequences for doing so. There are also ground vehicles for purchase in the marketplace.

As an alternative, if you are on PC, I highly recommended MamuDesign’s FSExplore. With the paid version, you can get out of your plane and choose from multiple vehicles to drive from the airport to these locations in avatar mode. Or you can go to a trailhead and take a guided hike. And it’s very easy to create POIs and the trails themselves. I’ve been creating dozens of the more popular trails within (and also outside of) the national parks.

I agree with you, we do not need airfields or flight strips that do not exist in reality. So if none is available inside a national park, it’d be perfectly fine to simply have the closest one to its boundaries as a handcrafted airfield. Any airfield really, or heliport. Just SOMEthing that gives me a place to climb into an aircraft or helicopter and depart to enjoy the park but also enjoy an authentic location at departure and landing.

I just flew the helicopter flight over Bryce Canyon. Started in 2D on 2 monitors and it was stunning. About halfway through switched to VR and the flight was smooth and beautiful. Great work.

I agree that there was a lot more opportunity to bolster nearby airports with some hand-crafting.

I have a POI list on another WU22 thread to which I just added POI coordinates as well as the nearest public airport. Also includes magnetic bearing and distance from the listed airport to the POI.