Have you ever spent too much time choosing Departure / Arrival airports for your flight? This application provides a solution for this problem by suggesting airports that you can fly from or fly to considering several factors. The application can scan your MSFS Community folder looking for airport addons. With this information, the app can help you utilize your addons, and plan flights with these airports, which can be very helpful for players with a lot of addons.
Features
- Scan your Microsoft Flight Simulator Community, and marketplace folder for Addons
- The app can scan for linked folders created with Addon Linker, scan runs automatically at the first start
- Visualize your addon airports on a map
- Generate flights between your addon, or any other airports
- Calculate distance between airports, and get an estimated flight time with custom average speed
- Display all MSFS airports, filter it by properties
- Generate Departure / Arrival airports based on
- Airport type
- Country
- Flight Distance
- Flight time (ETE)
- If addon scenery is available for the airport
- Display bing 3d photogrammetry (The accuracy of the boundaries will improve over time, it involves a lot of manual work)
- Display VATSIM and Ivao traffic and atc coverage (CTR atc boundaries may not fully be accurate yet, check it from other sources before your flight)
- Filter add-on and default airports by ATC availability
- You can generate SimBrief flightplans right from the app, and display ofp or PDF, or download flightplans for your aircrafts
- Option to filter your addons on the map, or disable a specific one
- Option to display precipitation, cloud data on map (Data source: RainViewer api)
- Search airport by icao / airport name
- Add multiple airports to route
- Export route to .PLN format to open in MSFS or further editing in other softwares
- Airport METAR data is displayed in selected airport data section if available for the airport (Data source: MET Norway)
- Save app state and load it automatically for each session
- Choose from several map style
- Copy coordinates with right click
- Scan GSX ini configurations
Installation (This is a portable version)
- Download, extract the .rar file (with WinRAR or similar) to any location you have write, read access
- Start the application with AirportFinder.exe file
Usage
- Start the application with AirportFinder.exe file
- On the first start select your Flight Simulator Community folder (https://helpdesk.aerosoft.com/hc/en-gb/articles/5023507568925-How-to-locate-the-Community-folder-in-Microsoft-Flight-Simulator)
- If you use Addon Linker app you can select its settings folder, if it doesen't gets recognised automatically
- By default that folder is: "c:\programdata\msfs addons linker"
- After first startup, you can check added addon folders in the Settings page. If one of your (E.g Official/OneStore or Official/Steam) folder wasn't added aoutomatically, you can add it manually with "Add Addon folder location button"
- By default, the map view shows installed addon sceneries with green circles
- Circle size represents the airport size, red circle indicates a closed airport
- On the left Menu bar, you can scroll through all your MSFS addons
- Click on an airport to select it, then you can set the selected airport as Departure / Arrival airport
- You can also generate random airports for Departure / Arrival from
- Airports you have addon installed
- Airports with specific size
- Airports displayed on the map
- All airports
- You can filter random airports by distance, ETE. Note, that you have to set at least one airport(Departure or Arrival) for the panel to appear.
- If you have both a valid arrival and departure airport selected the application will calculate the flight distance.
- You can display default airports too which you don’t have 3rd party scenery installed for. These airports are appearing as blue circles on the map.
- On the left side of the map page, you can find an airport filtering panel. With this you can filter default airports by
- Type
- Country
- Maximum, minimum radius from selected airport IMPORTANT: You must select an airport for this to work as described!
- You can select, and display the layer type from the Weather Settings panel on the left side
- Airport METAR data is displayed in selected airport data section if data is available
- You can add other airports to route by selecting it and clicking add to route, or entering the airprot ICAO code to "Add other airports to route" field
- You can export the route to .PLN format with "export route .PLN" button in the calculate airport distance section
- You can search for airports with find airport field located on the left side below Weather Settings panel.
- Bing 3d photogrammetry display can be enabled from the "Bing 3d photogrammetry" panel on the left side.
- You can choose the best suited map style for your flight in the "Tile layer selector" panel (E.g the terrain map style if you want to plan a flight in the mountains)
- You can enable VATSIM or Ivao Traffic, ATC coverage to display in the Vatsim/Ivao panel (below the "Find airport panel")
- If you have enabled vatsim/ivao ATC display, you can filter the shown airports on the map to only show airports with ATC availability. Enable "Show airports only with ATC" button in the Non add-on or the add-on airport filtering panel.
- If VATSIM/IVAO ATC display is enabled rings around airport circles are showing atc availability.(each atc type has its own color) You can hover on the dot for further ATC information.
- SimBrief feature usage:
- If you have a selected Arrival and Departure airport you can click "Generate flight plan with SimBrief" button in the Calculate Airport Distance section
- On the SimBrief panel you can select / modify the data for the flightplan generation
- If there is an option you want to use which is not present in the app you can open it on the SimBrief website with the "open plan in SimBrief" button (below the big "Generate flightplan" button) for further editing.
- You can start the generation with the "Generate flightplan" button
- After successfull generation the OFP will pop up in an another panel. You can open the generated plan on the SimBrief website with Open in SimBrief button.
- You can open the OFP in a PDF format by clicking Open PDF button
- If you want to download the flightplan for a specific airplane you can select it with select flightplan download selector
- On the main map page in the calculate airport distance panel there is a button "Open last SimBrief OFP" for opening last generated flightplan OFP if you have generated one in the current session.
- Your generated flight plan will be loaded on the map after generation, you can hide it with the "Hide simbrief route" button
- You can now filter your addon airports with "Filter your add-on airports panel" under the non addon filter panel
- You can filter by airport type
- Scenery creators can be excluded too, you can exclude as many creators as you want from the map
- You can disable a specific addon to hide it from the map. On the left menu panel in the addon list you have "Enabled"/"Disabled" button for each addon.
- If scenery information couldn't be extracted from the scenery files and is not appearing on the map you can manually set Icao, and airport coordinates. With theese addons in the addon list panel there is a "Set Position" button for setting these information.
- GSX feature usage:
- If you have GSX pro installed the app should pick up the config folder location. You can check in the settings page under "GSX ini configs folder".
- If the app didn't find the folder and you have GSX installed, you can select the config folder manually. It should be (C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\Virtuali\GSX\MSFS) by default.
- If the GSX folder is set up correctly the app should display airports with GSX config installed with light brown dots.
- If an airport with GSX config insalled is selected, a new line will appear in the Selectedd Airport panel (GSX Configuration). The "Show gates" button will show all the gates present in the .ini file with properties.
- You can filter your displayed airports to show only airports with GSX config installed. Check the "Show only airports with GSX configuration" checkbox.
Planned features
- Display real world traffic
- Filter airports by weather conditions
- Adding real world airline routes
- Adding filtering by Continent, Region, City, elevation
Troubleshooting
- If you only see the "Loading" text without the map, try moving the app folder to your C disk and delete the "Data" folder inside AirportFinder's directory
Please Note: This is an unstable BETA version of the application.
If you like the app and you would like to support my work on Buy Me a Cofee, Click here
Thanks for reading :)
i have a small issue however. i have several addon airports that it does not seem to detect as being addons. i tried re-scanning and deleting the data folder but it didn't help. when i select them in the map it says "not addon airport"
what is the criteria that it uses to determine if there is an addon? i'm thinking maybe there is something amiss with the manifest.json file or something? i've noticed that a few of them are from the same creator.
some examples of airports that it doesn't detect include KPTK and KIWD from the flightsim.to site.
thanks so much for making this awesome program!
7 days ago
spesimen
12 days ago
11 days ago
kisbAlt
LeeH
15 days ago
11 days ago
kisbAlt
Hawkmoon
2 months ago
ivatt
3 months ago
gromto
4 months ago
ausmo
4 months ago
joergMD
5 months ago
5 months ago
kisbAlt
LeeH
6 months ago
6 months ago
kisbAlt
LarryFS2020
9 months ago
flipside
Fantastic stuff - this is really developing nicely!
9 months ago
louiseuk
Amazing tool! By any chance is it open-source? I have implemented a somewhat similar thing as a standalone web-tool for myself but would love to see the weather based search in your more feature-reach product, so I would be glad to help.
11 months ago
I haven't published the source code, sorry. Perhaps after a large refactoring.
10 months ago
kisbAlt
knidarkness
12 months ago
On startup the app scans your community folders. Based on the number of add-ons this could even take 10-20 seconds
12 months ago
kisbAlt
pablomijack32
Really, really great software!
I recently deleted all my addons and I reinstalled MSFS on another drive, I also reinstalled AddonLinker.
However all my past airport addons are showing in Airport Finder even if they are deleted from my SSD and they don't appear in AddonLinker.
How can I get rid of them on the map?
Also, the 3D Bing coverage lacks some countries like Spain, Australia...
Keep it up and thank you very much!
12 months ago
Thanks! Try deleting the "Data" folder in AirportFinder folder, and start the app.
12 months ago
kisbAlt
noooch
Some of my addons are obviously encrypted because I bought them from the Marketplace so they don't show up. It would be a very nice feature to be able to add a location manually, so you know its a payware airport. I buy sooo many I often forget lol. I love using airport finder to keep track of my payware and freeware locations.
1 years ago
MrSpeaker