Yorkton Municipal Airport is situated approximately three kilometers north of the City of Yorkton, Saskatchewan. The airfield was built in 1940 for the Royal Canadian Air Force, as a British Commonwealth Air Training Plan station. It orginally had four hard-surface runways, six double hangars, an operations building with a control tower, hospital and many other buildings. The station was home to No. 11 Service Flying Training School (twin-engined Cessna Cranes) and later No. 23 Elementary Flying Training School (singel-engined Fleet Cornells). During the immediate post-war period the station was kept open as home to No. 2 Flight Training School. The station closed in late 1945. In 1947, the federal Department of Transport took over the airfield.
Today, only a few of the wartime buildings remain. The operations building serves as the airport terminal and airport manager's office. Only two of the original hangars remain. The hangar immediately adjacent to the terminal facilitates general aviation at the airport. The other has had an industrial use for a considerable period of time, first as a agricultural implements factory and lately as agricultural fertilizer warehouse. A new steel-framed, synthetic canvas storage structure was recently constructed on the concrete pad of one of the demolished wartime hangars to provide additional hangar space.
Of the four original runways, two remain in use. Runway 03 - 21 is hard-surfaced and was lengthed in 1959 to 4800 feet. Runway 12 - 30 is gravel and is 3000 feet in length, with first 600 feet being hard-surfaced. New taxi-ways were constructed in 1965 and remain in use. Remnants of the decommisioned wartime runways remain visible. One of the decommissioned runways sometimes serves as a drag racing strip during the summer months.
Yorkton airport offers a variety of general aviation services. flight training, aircraft rentals, charter services, crop spraying, aircraft maintenance and servicing, and charter helicopter operations. The principal operators at the airport are Yorkton Aircraft, operating out of the wartime hangar that was for many years home to Yorkton Flying Services, as well as the new hangar. Leading Edge Aviation also operates from the wartime hangar, offering charter and training with a small fleet of Cessna 150s and 172s. During summers the Royal Canadian Air Cadets operate gliding instruction from the field. West Wind aviation runs a daily bank "bag run" from Regina and back. The Canadian Forces has on occasion deployed a CC-130 Hercules to Yorkton to run Civil Air Search and Rescue Association exercises. Canadian Forces Harvard II training aircraft from Moose Jaw often do cross country flights to Yorkton and practice missed approaches. Among the many corporate visitors noted at the field in recent years are aircraft operated by Walmart, Mosaic Minerals, Premium Brands, Wendys, McDermott Lumber, and Comfort Inn & Suites. Between 80 and 100 medi-vacs occur each year.
CYQV is one of those tiny airports where the Yorkton airport of the flightsim world has no resemblance to the real world airport. I decided to model the airport so that I'd have places to fly in my home province. You can find my other projects by searching my name on AVSIM. This virtual model of CYQV represents the airport as it was in summer of 2008, when I visited to take photos for this project.
CYQV Yorkton was constructed using GMAX. It includes photo-real custom models all the buildings at the airport, runway signs, refueling facilites, garages, weather station, fencing and trees, and a rotating beacon. CYQV also incorporates a landclass file to better represent the terrain around the airport, at least as far as the limits of the default landscape will allow. It also includes custom ground textures to replicate the crumbling decommisioned runways, cracked tarmac and the hard-surfaced first 600 feet of runway 12-30. The only thing I didn't get around to was modelling the numerous derelict agricultural aircraft situated around the new hangar.
You will need the RWY 12 (or EZ-scenery equivalent packages) called Lars ExtraObjects and Finney ground objects to see the vehicles and few items. The airport was designed to fit the road patterns accurately layed-down by UT Canada / Alaska, which I highly recommend.
I have no idea how well this scenery works in FSX.
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Extra files for FSGenisis 38.2m terrain mesh for western Canada
If you are running FSGenisis 38.2m terrain mesh for western Canada, look for the following file in "FSGenesis Terrain Mesh modification" folder included in this package and add it to your CYQV Yorkton Scenery folder before installation.
CYQV_Area_elevations.bgl
This file contains a re-mesh of the terrain immediately surrounding the airport. As is often the case when using a fine terrain mesh such as the FS Genesis product, you end up with some of the airport on a plateau because FS9 forces the whole airport to the same elevation even though in real life the elevations do vary, sometimes considerably. My re-mesh is not perfect but is an improvement.
Of course, if you are not using the FSGenesis (or similar) product, ignore this step.
Please note these are default textures for each of the seasons. They are used on the mound of earth on the old BCATP concrete target range to the east of the large hangar. I have included in the texture folder because I don't know if these same files are included with FSX texture set and although I don't know if this scenery will work with FSX, if it does you will probably need these files. If you are running FS9 and don't want these as duplicates, you may delete.
I have a few texture files from my other sceneries. The following files were included in my other sceneries.
wire gate.bmp
barb wire tall fence.bmp
YQR_fencing_wire.bmp
Fuel Pumps and Tank.bmp
Tank Walkway Textures.bmp
wire gate.bmp
If you have already installed all my other airports these files are redundant and you can safely delete to avoid duplication. If you are not sure, leave them where they are.
Separate Scenery and Texture directories are included for CYQV airport.
If you had installed the Yorkton airport scenery by Warren Johnson please uninstall and delete this scenery before installation. Warren's scenery is not compatable with my rendition of CYQV, it being a fictional depiction of the airfield layout. An AFCAD file for my Yorkton airfield is included in the Scenery folder. Ensure that you have no other CYQV Afcad files active in your set up. Finally, this scenery was developed to match the road patterns of UT Canada/Alaska.
1. Unzip the CYQV Yorkton folder (scenery and texture sub-folders) into the Flight Simulator9/Addon Scenery folder.
2. Start Flight Simulator 2004 and go to Settings and then click on Scenery Library. Click on tha Add Area button, which will open FS 9 Directory. Click on the Addon Scenery
folder and then browse until you find the CYQV Yorkton folder. Click on the CYQV Yorkton folder and then click OK. Make sure the "enabled" box next to the airport name is checked off. Finally, if you have installed the Ultimate Terrain Canada/Alaska product, make sure the CYQV Yorkton folder is situated above UT Canada/Alaska in the list of add-on sceneries. If it is not click on the CYQV line and use the move button to move the airport up or down, as required.
3. Close and then Restart FS. Go to airport CYQV . Enjoy!
It is probably a good idea to turn off ground object shadows in the settings display. This will help improve performance. I have also labeled the bgl files in the scenery folder so it is easy to eliminate aspects of the airport if you want to simplify the scenery. For instance, by deleting the file "CYQV_raceway_bleachers.bgl" you will elimiate the infield bleachers used for raceway spectators along one of the old BCATP runways.
This scenery includes custom ground textures for the taxiways and aprons. During testing on machines with low-end graphic cards, I noted that these textures sometimes experience a "roll-up" effect as your aircraft taxis to the runway. This effect did not occur when the scenery was tested on machines with medium to higher end graphic cards. If you have such an experience, you can remove the CYQV_taxiways.bgl file from the scenery folder. Your taxiways will then be the default textures applied through the afcad file.
In order to save some time and to cover for my lack of ability in some areas, I have enhanced the basic CYQV structures with a few of the excellent scenery objects found at AVSIM and elsewhere. In order to see CYQV in its full glory, you will need a couple of the Rwy12 object libraries (or their EZ-Scenery equivalents); particularly Lars ExtraObjects by Lars Hoyer & Irvin McIntyre and Finney Ground objects by Robert"Lt.Finney" Finnegan. Rwy12 Object Placer Program was developed by Israel Roth and Seev Kahn (http://www.rwy12.com/). The libraries are widely available as freeware on most flightsim download sites. Of course, if you do not have these libraries installed then objects will not show up in your CYQV scenery. These are simply enhancements and not necessary to run the CYQV.
Here are the files names you should donwload from AVSIM and install.
Ramplight_Library from ESDG Hangar Kit by Bill Leming:
esdg_ramplight_rwy12.zip
Extra Objects vehicle collection by Lars Hoyer -- Either the ez-extra-objects package and/or the Runway 12 as follows:
extra_objects_v1_1.zip
ez-extra-objects-1.zip
The Robert "Lt.Finney" Finnegan set of objects as follows:
Please note that if you decide to use this scenery, it is free so don't expect it to be up to commercial standards! Use at your own risk although I can't imagine what that this scenery is of risk. It worked fine in testing! And, this is my hobby and not a profession so I don't have all the answers to technical questions. I will try to help if I can. And, again, I have no idea if this will work in FSX. For the foreseeable, I am happy to stick to FS9 and plan on doing a few more Saskatchewan airports for FS9.
If you are interested in some other Saskatchewan airports and AI traffic, search my name on AVSIM and you will find a few airports, repaints and flightplans.
