EFMA airport review

Sim: Flight Simulator 2004

Information:

Mariehamn is the largest town in Åland island group between Finland and Sweden. Only Swedish is spoken in Åland islands. The island group consists of more than 6500 islands. All 25000 people living in Åland live in 65 of the islands and just over 40% of them live in the largest town, Mariehamn.

The Mariehamn airport was built in 1934 to be a security landing field for aircraft flying from Helsinki and Turku to Stockholm and back. The buildings there now were built in 1964. Mariehamn is quite a small airport; only about 20 takeoffs per day, two airlines operating there regularly (Finnair and European Executive).

Mariehamn airport is the latest addition to Finnish Scenery Designers´ very high quality sceneries.

The download is about 8.2MB, which isn't very much because of the large textures included.The installation of the scenery is very basic and there are good instructions in English, Finnish and Swedish included. Also it is very highly recommended to install the Finnclass and Finnterrain add-ons, because the greatly enhance the scenery in whole of Finland and they make the coastlines, lakes and roads realistic in the whole area. All of these add-ons are available at www.fsnordic.net.

The scenery itself

First impression about the scenery is very realistic and there is a strong “being there” feeling. It also has to be noted that there seems to be no frame rate hit, so it can be run in a lower-end computer as well. Also the red apron and runway texture might surprise someone, but it is very realistic, the asphalt in EFMA really is that red, it comes from the Åland´s own rocks, I think.

The airport itself is quite small, so there naturally aren’t so many buildings. The buildings are photorealistic and very detailed if you look at them from a closer distance. The textures are very sharp and it really looks like the real thing, if you compare a screenshot of this scenery and a real photo of the airport there really isn't much difference.  This is a very good and professional feeling quality scenery and a must if you like to fly in Finnish archipelago. Also the Finnterrain and Finnclass sceneries are needed if you want to fly in Finland. It seems that Microsoft hasn't paid very much attention to the Scandinavian area, so these add-ons are needed for a realistic flying experience. The best thing about all these FISD sceneries is that they are completely freeware!

Overview of the airport

Great details

great looking scenery and good frame rates too!

Looks just like the real airport.