With the Microsoft Flight Simulator over Estonia
Why Estonia? Well, although it doesn't offer any high mountains, Estonia is a beautiful country with its untouched nature, swamps and woods,
jagged coasts and numerous small and large islands. Perfect for some relaxing island-hopping and bush flying aside from the well-known sceneries
(and also perfect for nice bicycle tours in the real life, just to mention...).
And especially a good supplement for flights through Scandinavia: Estonia is the southern neighbour of Finland, which is a rewarding flying area due
to the great freeware scenerys of the "Finnish Scenery Designers" (FISD). Besides the international airport of the capital Tallinn and the regional airports of Pärnu,
Tartu, Kuressaare (Saaremaa island) and Kärdla (Hiiumaa island) there are numerous small and private airfields. Not to forget the officially closed ones that
are still sometimes used by private aviation. An interesting destination as well are the airfields on the small islands Kihnu and Ruhnu, that serve
the supply of the islands during the winter months .
What Estonian scenery add-ons are out there for the MS Flight Simulator? This website should answer that question and give you an overview
of all existing add-ons and where to get them.
But its main purpose is to provide information about the Estonian Landscape Scenery, on which I have
worked for almost a year. Completely created manually, the scenery was made to show Estonia "as real as it gets" within the
limitations of the flight simulator. It is a base scenery that modifies landclasses, roads, lakes, rivers, islands and
coastlines, but does not add any objects or airfields. Luckily, there are Estonian colleagues who work upon filling this gap.
On this website, you can also find an overview of all Estonian airports and airfields and which of them are
already available for the flight simulator.
Happy flights,
Holger Fillbrandt
Latest News and Updates to FS Estonia:
- 15.03.2007: Scenery updates for FSX: Viljandi and Ruhnu
Paavo Pihelgas has updated his sceneries of Viljandi (EEVI) and Ruhnu (EERU) for FSX.
Both add-ons include high resolution photo textures in the surroundings of the airfields. Due to their size, they are currently only available at
AVSim:
Viljandi FSX, Ruhnu FSX.
- 27.01.2007: First FSX add-ons released!
Two sceneries for FSX have been released lately: Stas Nezmanov has converted his Tallinn scenery to FSX and added some additional buildings.
The beta version of the scenery (version 0.34) can be downloaded here or at AVSim. Obviously it is not yet the final
version, as the seasons have to be changed manually by the user (which isn't mentioned in the readme file).
"Estonian Airspace", which is the new scenery by Paavo Pihelgas, corrects the so-called 'invisible scenery' of the flight simulator
in Estonia. This includes all navigation data like VOR's and NDB's, airspace borders and so on, which is essential for a realistic simulation.
You can find the scenery under the point More Add-Ons.
Unfortunately there are still no news about a possible update of Estonian Landscape for FSX. As far as I see I'll have to wait for updates
of certain tools to be able to convert the data.
- 22.11.2006: New add-on scenery for FS2004: Rakvere
Finally I found some time to create another Estonian scenery (after Estonian Landscape). It turned out to be a photoreal representation
of the city of Rakvere and the small airfield on the northern side of it. You can find some
screenshots and more information here, and you can download the scenery at the usual
airfield download page. I hope you like it!
- 18.10.2006: Estonia and FSX
FSX has finally arrived, and of course the first question is: How does it feel to have and use the new one, how does it represent
Estonia (not to forget the rest of the world) and, first of all: Do all our nice addons work?
The following article in the new subsection 'articles' takes an in-depth look at these questions
and also shows some screenshots.
- 31.07.2006: New freeware scenery for FS2004 released: Ruhnu (EERU)
The scenery by Paavo Pihelgas covers the whole island of Ruhnu with aerial images (with
autogen) and includes
the small local airfield. The download is available here at FS-Estonia or at
Paavo's site.
- 25.07.2006: Why waiting impatiently for FSX? Even FS98 still has a dedicated fanbase programming add-ons! Early this year
a new version of Tallinn airport EETN, made by Pablo Schultze-Rhonhof, saw the light of day (click on images to enlarge):
Seeing this, don't you want to stop counting the days until Raimo's Tallinn 2006 release and go back to good old FS98? ;-)
The scenery is available at FlightSim.com under the filename eetn98.zip.
- 24.07.2006: The Estonian scenery designer Paavo Pihelgas is back
with a new homepage, where he informs about the
progress of his projects (only in Estonian). Main work at the moment is the airport of Tartu (EETU).
- 28.04.2006: Work in progress: New Tallinn scenery by Raimo Västrik. Besides a detailed reproduction of the airport, Tallinn 2006
will include photoreal ground textures with custom autogen for the city of Tallinn and its surroundings!
More infos and screenshots here.
- 22.10.2005: Jari Varje from the Finnish Scenery Designers (FISD) has released a Patch for the Tallinna linnahall (Tallinn cityhall)
heliport that was included in the Helsinki city scenery by FISD. The position of the building relied upon the default coastline of FS2004,
so it was located in the water using the exact coasts of Estonian Landscape. This is now fixed. The update can be downloaded
here, the Helsinki city scenery can be found at FISD or
FS Nordic.
- 13.10.2005: EETN (Tallinn) sceneries by Raimo Västrik and Stanislav Nezmanov now added here
for download (with screenshots)!
- 27.09.2005: Stanislav Nezmanov has released version 1.1 of his Tallinn (EETN) scenery (sources).
Compatibility to the Estonian Landscape scenery has been improved through better placement of various buildings. But still the
files 2.bgl, 3.bgl und 5.bgl have to be deactivated for best results in combination with Estonian Landscape (see compatibility).
- 26.09.2005: Screenshots for the add-on airports Kuressaare (EEKE), Kihnu (EEKU) and Viljandi (EEVI) by Paavo Pihelgas
have been added here.
- 15.07.2005: The add-on sceneries of the airports Kuressaare (EEKE), Kihnu (EEKU) and Viljandi (EEVI) by Paavo Pihelgas are now also
available from here in a version that is full compatible with the "Estonian Landscape" scenery.
-
29.06.2005: The Estonian Landscape scenery is finally ready for download!
Also new: Compatibility information between Estonian Landscape and all known Estonian sceneries!
-
27.06.2005: Added new EETN-Scenery by Stanislav Nezmanov to the airport-list.
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