The Mystery Behind LEZG

OK so I was hoping u fellas could help me crack this one. I have been thoroughly exploring Spain since WUVIII was released and I have come across something I can’t wrap my head around.

I was getting ready to fly in and around the city of Saragosa, which seems to be one of the country’s most important cities, to marvel at some of the newly released POIs in that region. Now, as I was setting up the flight I noticed that the map shows what appears to be a medium-size international airport (LEZG) west of the city but for whatever reason I could not depart from it. For a moment I thought “well, I guess you can’t have every single airport on the planet” and I moved on. But then a second later I noticed two much smaller airports in the area that are in fact playable:

Then things got even weirder as I zoomed in on that satellite image of LEZG and the airport got completely blurred out as you can see in the screenshot below.

So I guess my question is, what is the deal with LEZG? Why is the game seemingly intentionally trying to hide it? I mean, why would MSFS make the decision to make those two tiny airports playable while keeping LEZG under lock?

Maybe some of you have an explanation, so let’s hear it! I am genuinely very curious.

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I am not from Spain but I googled LEZG and I could see that it is home for the SAF.

Any airport with military aspect and not part of the public data (Bing etc) is not represented/rendered in the sim… There is one for example in southern France, and it is also replaced with generic textures.

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Same case than LEMG, shared airport with civil/military, but I don’t know why not create the civil part like LEMG.
A pure military airport for example is LETO or LEAB.

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This shows you the kind of garbage the sim team has to deal with for world updates - a conflicting mess of regulations and limits based on differing ideas about “secrecy,” “security,” whatever all around the world.

Google Maps shows the airport better than Bing, but still blurred and lower-res than the surrounding city. Since this was once on the list of Trans-Atlantic Abort sites for shuttle launches should something have gone wrong during a launch, you would think there has to be better images for pilots to use training.

A quick internet search returns a number of historical USAF approach charts, too, but no modern aerial imagery.

Silly.

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Hello, here is the Zaragoza Airport, 5 city of Spain.

LEZG Zaragoza » Microsoft Flight Simulator

This is my city, not what’s in the game.

Zaragoza, Aragón, Spain » Microsoft Flight Simulator

Greetings

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Yes that’s a shared civil-military airport. The military portion is one of the main’s airbases in the country.

Disabling some military airports in game is a pity but yeap it has no sense in some way. At least the field should be there, even if it’s not true to life. They would use generic hangars and buildings anyway so that does not reveal anything sensible in terms of security which can’t be found just looking at google at the end of the day. Info about the base including pictures can be found in internet or at the official Air Force website, as in most cases with any other military areas worldwide provided that they are not secret bases.

Cheers

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Thank you everyone for getting back to me so quickly. I think you guys are right. The military base thingy explains it.

LEZG has been discussed here several times:

Os old simmer I have been using AirHispania LEZG in other sims, but with MSFS I’m afraid that in any update becomes not compatible and we don’t have the basic airport.

Un afectuoso saludo desde Zaragoza

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In the UK most of the RAF bases last time I checked, were there, both on Bing and in the sim.
All you get though in the main is the basic runways and no Asobo animation such as ground traffic.
Some of the bigger ones are animated such as Lossiemouth in Scotland but the modelling is very basic.
I doubt Asobo are blotting anything out because it is military. More likely is they are leaving it out. Similar to the massive trees everywhere, end of the day you can only model so much. They hide where the modelling ends.

The problem comes from Bing maps where many military airports are hidden.
Because of the automatic scenery generation if the airport is hidden in Bing maps there is nothing to generate, and they dont make it by hand…

In Google maps LEZG is not hidden, is blurred but the runways are visible

Anyway, even if these airports can’t be done in game, it would be good practice to hidde them with nicer/proper textures, as these generic textures look HORRIBLE, and catch you eye inmediately, breaking inmersion so hard. Please Asobo, make texture patching better.

This is a way to solve this, but requires work (manhours):
Posted in August 2020…

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Zaragoza is the centre of the textile trade in Spain and has many civil freighter flights daily.

As said since my time of Alpha tester and repeated several times in this forum and Zendesk, after 4 years there is no justification for not having this airport as default in MSFS instead the non existent LEZA
Fortunately we have the well done Air Hispania LEZG one but one day an update can crash it.

It is so weird this happens (as far as I checked) only with the spanish military bases, which sadly almost all double as civil airports.

If one checks Germany, all the German bases are there, and even the Rammstein NATO base appears in the sim

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