BANGOR (KBGR) INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT FOR FS2002
BY JOHN YOUNG

TURN WORD WRAP ON

A detailed scenery of Bangor International Airport Maine, incorporating photo-realistic textures, full night lighting and winter snow effects. The scenery should also work well with FS2000 but this has not been tested.

THE AIRPORT

Bangor International Airport, according to its web site, is recognised as one of the fastest growing and most dynamic regional airports in the U.S. The Airport offers over 50 flights a day to and from major cities in the Northeast, national and regional hubs, and the vacation destinations of Florida and the Caribbean. The majority of the services are provided on modern jet aircraft for non-stop, comfortable and convenient flights to major and regional hubs.

Service Destinations include Boston (Delta, American, Northwest, Midwest Express), New York City LaGuardia (American), Philadelphia, (USAirways), Cincinnati (Delta), Baltimore-Washington (Pan Am), Albany (Continental), Orlando Sanford (Pan Am) Saint John NB (Boston-Maine Airways) and Halifax Nova Scotia (Boston-Maine Airways).

WHY BANGOR INTERNATIONAL FOR FS2002?

So what prompted a Brit, living in the UK to design scenery for Bangor International? 3 reasons:

* Firstly, I was asked by William Gelo, who works at the airport, to design it for him. I have never really met anyone as passionate about an airport as Bill and when I saw some of the old photographs he sent me I really became hooked. The modern day airport is built on the site of the old Dow Air base and many of its features still exist today. I could not resist the temptation to have a go at modelling them, especially the remains of the old taxi-ways, the F-101 calibration barns and some of the historic buildings on the General Aviation side of the airport.

* The second reason was the availability of good reference material. Quite apart from what Bill had managed to send me, the Marketing Department at Bangor International were wonderful in producing material to enable an accurate design of the commercial side of the airport. I am indebted to Jeff Russell who carefully took pictures of the Terminal and General Aviation area structures for me and to Tiffany Philbrick who processed them and despatched them to me in batches.

* The third reason is that Bangor International will be well remembered by many UK holidaymakers flying to Florida and making a refuelling stop at Bangor en-route. I did this myself a couple of years ago and I still remember some of the interesting features seen there.

It's been a fascinating design experience and after some 600 hours of work, I have produced a scenery for FS2002 that I believe is representative of the real thing. I have studied hundreds of photographs of the airport and feel fit to apply for a job as a "follow me" truck driver if I was ever given the opportunity!

INSTALLATION

This is very detailed scenery that will be demanding of a high specification PC (tested with a 2 Gigabyte processor, 768 Mbytes of RAM and Geforce 3 graphics card). However, I have designed it so that users can elect to omit some of the more frame-rate hungry features by reference to the list of .bgl files given below. Coupled with a conservative use of the display controls in FS2002, it is possible to pick and mix and trade detail for frame rate if desired. Follow these steps to install to FS2002 (FS2000):

1) Unzip the archive to a temporary folder somewhere on your hard drive.

2) Move the two folders Bangor\Scenery and Bangor\Texture to your FS2002\Scenery folder. 2) Move the two folders Bangor\Scenery and Bangor\Texture to your FS2002\Scenery folder so that you have a path that looks like this:

FS2002\Scenery\Bangor with two sub folders below Bangor - Scenery and Texture.

Keep the spelling of "texture" in the singular. I still get a few e-mails from people who install as "textures" and wonder why everything is displayed in white.

3) Launch FS2002 and go to the World/Scenery Library drop down menu. In the scenery library press "Add Area" and navigate to the folder where Bangor is installed. Add in the area.

You are ready to fly and can access Bangor through the "Go to Airport" menu using the "search places" (default start up) or "search add-on scenery". The latter has a number of start-up positions specific to my scenery. You might want to fly at this point but please read on in order to get the most out of the scenery.

Trading detail for frame-rate

4) My scenery for Bangor is structured into discrete .BGL files to enable less important items to be left out in order to trade detail for frame rate. The content of the files is as follows:

Bangor1.BGL - Runway, taxi-ways, all base polygons and roads.

Bangor2.BGL - 3-D objects such as airport buildings and jetways.

Bangor 3.BGL - New river section through Bangor with 3 bridges.

Bangor4.BGL - Taxi-way signs and "wig-wag" lights.

Bangor5.BGL - The perimeter fence.

Bangor6.BGL - Static aircraft (Dornier 328 and Dash-8).

Bangor7.BGL - Static aircraft (A300, L1011 and ERJ-145 x 2).

Bangor8.BGL - Static aircraft (KC-135E's)

Bangor9.BGL - Static aircraft on the General Aviation side.

Bangor10.BGL - Trees.

Bangor11.BGL - Vehicles.

New runway texture.

5) You will find an additional folder in the Zipped archive containing an optional replacement concrete runway texture (runway11.bmp) by Esteban Aldarondo. Unfortunately, Esteban has not included his e-mail address in his documentation so I have been unable to seek his permission to include his file in my archive to save users the task of downloading separately. However I feel sure he would not object to this so long as everything remains as freeware. The texture is a great improvement on the default and should be copied to your main S20002\texture folder to over-write the existing one after first backing it up if required.

Ed Denny Mesh Scenery for Maine

6) I would recommend downloading this scenery (sitting below Bangor in your scenery library) to improve the topographical elevations in the base scenery for the State of Maine. The file is "memesh.zip" and is available at SurClaro and SurClaro.com. Because the zip file is about 2.6 Mbytes in size, I have not sought permission to include it in my archive.

Dynamic Aircraft

7) FS2002 contains a number of moving aircraft (Artificially Intelligent traffic) that will follow paths laid down in the default Bangor scenery. However these paths will not necessarily align with my taxi-ways and for this reason aircraft may well taxi where they should not. To correct this I have produced a replacement file that correctly aligns everything to my scenery. Unfortunately installation is not quite as simple as swapping over a file. The dynamic aircraft information for Bangor is buried in a much larger geographical file for the NE USA and must first be extracted and then replaced with a new set. However the task is remarkably easy to do. You will need the excellent program "AFCAD" by Lee Swordy . Again, you will find this at SurClaro and SurClaro.com. All you do is import my kbgr1.txt file with the program and save. The program automatically creates a back up of the default file. You can also use AFCAD to alter or create more parking spots if you wish.

8) You might also want to increase the volume of dynamic traffic at Bangor (beware of frame-rate penalties however). This is done in a similar way to AFCAD but requires the program "Traffic Tools" by the same author. Again, I have included a text file (kbgr-flightplans.txt) to do this. After you de-compile the default flight plans with Traffic Tools (a very simple process) paste my additional lines to the bottom of the text file and then re-compile. You can add or delete lines at will. There are also many alternative liveries available at flightsim web sites for AI aircraft so that you can display your traffic as real-world airlines.

FLYING IN AND OUT OF BANGOR INTERNATIONAL

NAV aids and frequencies for KBGR are as follows:

Runway 33: (11441 ft), 333 degrees, ILS 110.30 (IBGR), Elevation 192 ft.

Runway 15: (11441 ft) 153 degrees, ILS 109.50 (IJVH), Elevation 192 ft.

VOR: BGR 114.80

ATTIS: 127.75

Ground: 121.90

Tower: 120.70.

POSSIBLE DISPLAY PROBLEMS

If you have problems displaying the transparency of the perimeter fence turn off "Ground Scenery Shadows" and "Dawn/Dusk Texture Smoothing" from the FS2002/FS2000 Display menu.

I have on this occasion decided to draw yellow taxi lines over the lighted aprons because this gives a crisper line compared to the alternative of laying down a 2-D macro that blurs horribly when approaching down the line with Mip Mapping switched on. However the trade-off with this method is that the line displays as black over the lighted polygons at night, although the green centre line lights are still present.
I
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

WILLIAM GELO for his inspiration, enthusiasm and reference materials to get me started and continued support en-route.

JEFF RUSSELL and TIFFANY PHILBRICK, Bangor International Airport Marketing Department, who took nearly 200 digital photographs for me. In the absence of these photographs I could never have guessed the complexity and colour scheme of the key commercial and GA side buildings and I am indebted to them both.

MANFRED MOLDENHAUER, for SCASM and Pascal Meziat, Brian McWilliams and Tom Hiscox for Airport 2.60 used to produce the airport plan layout.

RAFAEL GARCIA SANCHEZ, for his Nova program to produce 2-D and 3-D macros.

TREVOR DE STIGTER for M98toBGL used to create static aircraft.

MIKE WALLACE for use of his A300, L1011, Dash-8 and various Business jet/prop jet macros.

RICARDO MELLO AND MICHAEL D LYNDAKER for the use of their Embraer ERJ-145 as static objects.

H.-G.SCHNELL, ULRICH EFFERTZ and MIKE LEE for the use of their Dornier 328 as a static object. I was particularly keen to use this aircraft as it is depicted in one of the gate photographs that I have. Unfortunately the only available e-mail address in the readme file for this aircraft (the only one I could find) was not operative and I was unable to seek permission to include in my scenery. However in keeping with the spirit of the non-commercial enjoyment of the flight simulator community wording in Mike's readme file, I trust he would not have objected. If indeed there should be a problem, I have placed this object in a separate file that can easily be deleted from the upload.

LARRY HAINES for the use of his KC-135E and BRETT SUMPTER for his Pave Low III helicopter. Again I was unable to contact these authors because of out of date e-mail addresses. Same considerations apply as above.

LEGAL

Copyright of this scenery, apart from the static aircraft, which is subject to the copyright of the individual authors, is with John Young and the archive may not be altered in any way without my permission. The scenery is freeware. It has been designed for the benefit of the flight sim community world-wide. It may not be used, uploaded or placed on any medium that may cause money to be made in any way.

This software is provided "as is" with no guarantees or warranty of fitness and you use these files at your own risk.

MOST IMPORTANTLY

Have fun.

FEEDBACK OR HELP WITH PROBLEMS

Please email me at

john.young@btinternet.com

OTHER SCENERIES BY ME:

The following detailed sceneries by me are available for download at SurClaro:

London Stansted airport
RAF Mildenhall/Lakenheath
RAF Fairford
RAF Scampton - also available from the Red Arrows web site http://www.raf.mod.uk/reds
RAF Finningley

Just search the scenery library using my name.



John Young
Essex UK
E-mail: john.young@btinternet.com
November 2002