Hi all,
Mike has been making good progress on his part of the CA59 update. The first airport is Santa Ana (now John Wayne Orange County). Here is the terminal, complete with a little park in front. We found some old photos on Flikr that allowed Mike to rework all the buildings and hangars:
Also included are the Martin School of Aviation, the major business on the airport:
The next airport is Palm Springs. We found a vintage video on YouTube which allowed Mike to completely change the airport into a very nice little gem. Many more custom buildings and added hangars make it much more realistic:
The next airport (and city) that Mike will present is South Lake Tahoe, complete with Stateline, Nevada. He found an old postcard of the airport terminal, which allowed him to build this:
and he also built nearby Stateline, Nevada, the local gambling mecca. As usual, it's lit up at night, complete with little motels on the California side:
Since we're in the mountains, we'll move on to the Big Bear Lake area of Southern California. Mike has decided to include some smaller GA and charter airports to provide destinations for his new charter AI aircraft and to allow people to fly smaller aircraft around California to an assortment of fun destinations. Big Bear City airport is the highest airport in Southern California, and was (and is) used to travel to this mountain retreat. Mike got the terminal building from an old YouTube video and also rebuilt the lake and dam, correcting MS's poor attempt:
One place that Mike likes to fly is out in the southeastern desert areas of California, and thus has created several of the smaller airports in the area. This included changing the landclass of much of this region to match the real desert terrain, from the Salton Sea to the Gulf of California. The first airport is tiny Calipatria, not much more than a crop duster airport:
I have converted David Eckert's fine FS2000 Stearman model to an AI aircraft, and Mike has painted it into several liveries. Thanks to Dave Eckert for his permission to release these! Mike has then modified the plane into GA, sprayer, and duster versions. In the pic above you can see ACME sprayers and dusters lined up at their base.
Another small airport in the area is Brawley:
This airport, along with the others in this area, were served by C-air airlines out of Long Beach, using a DeHavilland Dove:
Our last airport on this desert tour is Calexico, which was a major gateway airport to Mexico and Baja, especially for fishing and other charters. Here is the airport at a busy time with C-46 and DC-3 charters in town. Although hard to see, the border fence with Mexico is just past the golf course:
Here is the land side of the airport, complete with the International Country Club, Customs, and the terminal. The pink building is Rosa's Plane Food, which still exists today. I found a mention on a forum that DXT3 textures used for things like fences (with transparency generated by an alpha channel) causes objects right behind the fence to become invisible. I have seen this at our Anchorage airport, for example, and we saw it here at Calexico as well. Converting the fence texture to DXT1 fixed this problem, although we had to create a new alpha channel image to compensate for the loss of the grayscale alpha channel (DXT1 only allows black and white). This affected both the fencelib and Finney fences libraries, used at many airports. The fixed textures will be included in the next Classic Libraries mega download.
Other airports that have been updated in this area include Imperial Co., Salton City, Thermal, Joshua Tree, and Blythe.
Heading back towards the big city brings us to San Bernadino's GA airport of the era, Tri Cities. This airport no longer exists, but was a colorful part of that area's aviation history. Run by Pinky Brier, an irascible but notable aviatrix, she provided FBO service to the airport, and even started a commuter airline:
Finally, we will travel 26 miles across the sea, to Santa Catalina, which is the island for me. Mike has re-created the Airport in the Sky, the only land airport on the island. The historic terminal, Wrigley's private hangar for his DC-3, the putting green, and other details like the playground and buffalo herds, are all here:
Mike is currently working on Avalon Bay, and still has a few more surprises waiting after that. Stay tuned!