This issue affects pretty much any large airport with multiple taxiways, that has not been hand built. I think even hand tweaked ones may be like this, and only fully hand built ones will offer any guarantee that that level of detail will be correct.
The AI ones will get the airport layout roughly right, but how can it determine a taxiway name from aerial photography or satellite footage? It has no way of determining what is A, B or C, and certainly not B1 or AE.
Smaller strips with a single runway, and a single, usually parallel taxiway aren’t as noticeably bad, for obvious reasons.
I haven’t used the stock TNCM for years, but I looked up, and down the MSFS editions list, and saw no mention of TNCM in any pack. So default is either AI only, which I illustrate below, or at best hand tweaked, where some manual effort has gone into the scenery, but not fully handmade.
So assuming it was AI only, this is the issue.
Can you discern any of the taxiway designations from the image below?
You could work out the runway designation, but the AI has no way of knowing which taxiway is which. Let’s say for sake of argument they the sections leading to the runway were A to F. Which direction do you use? A on the far left or the far right? The AI doesn’t know.
The AI could just as easily have assigned those with A to the right, and H, on the left.
Once you realise that pretty much any non-handcrafted airport is likely to be have wrong taxiway signage, it will make sense.
If TNCM was hand tweaked, then they have a case to answer, and just messed up their placement. for those two. Across the world there may be dozens like this. I think they stand out on the map as airports with a little socket like thing at the bottom left of its icon. Hand made ones are starred.
I think the AI separates the taxiway designation from the runway designation on the taxiway sign. So once the runway has been identified you would expect it to be consistent on all relevant taxiway signs. I don’t think it reevaluates the runway for each taxiway sign.
That is the reasonable assumption I think.
But I don’t think TNCM is AI. I forget which WU they beefed it up on.
That makes sense, I guess. So perhaps TNCM was hand tweaked in its default incarnation. The quick way to tell is have a look in the Official/OneStore folder, and see if there is a folder for TNCM, probably with Asobo or Microsoft in its folder name. It’s not on the list of airports that came with either of the three MSFS editions so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t hand made by default, so perhaps it is an AI tweaked one, and they messed up the taxiway designations for two of them.
I thought you meant that the taxi way signs were stock.
This is actually not third-party. The airport TNCM was added in the 40th Anniversary Edition, so if you go into your Content Manager, you will probably see this:
The reason I mention that is because the airport doesn’t have any taxiway signs when it’s uninstalled (something I will log a bug report for, as well).
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