RAF Burtonwood

[connieguy]

In the 1950s Burtonwood near Manchester was one of the largest and most important air bases in the United Kingdom, and was used by MATS until 1958, when they moved to Mildenhall. There is quite a lot of information available upon it on the internet, so I will confine references here to the Wikipedia article.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Burtonwood

I am grateful to Al Pingel for some time ago drawing my attention to the scenery by Glen Broome from 2008 which is available on Flightsim. Unfortunately (from our point of view) this rather impressive work depicts Burtonwood as it was during the Second World War and before the main East-West runway had been significantly lengthened and the others reduced to the status of taxiways. I therefore made a number of changes to it, replacing some of the hangars with the (in my opinion) better RAF hangars available in the stock libraries and also altering the AFCAD to reflect the later position. I use the UK VFR scenery and unfortunately Glen did not align the airfield with it, with the result that it is set rather too far south - see the illustration below. In practice this is not of too much importance. The VFR scenery dates from c.2000 and some of the buildings which survived then, and are visible on the scenery, have since been demolished. Today there is apparently very little left of this major site.

    I would like to release the new version of Burtonwood but an e-mail to Glen - who uploaded this and another file in 2008 but has apparently done nothing since - asking for permission has not received a reply. It would be possible for me to upload my additional files to be used in conjunction with Glen's original but of course the crucial Afcad is based on Glen's work. My understanding of UK Copyright law is that if something is significantly altered the copyright on it is no longer valid. However, I would be grateful for thoughts and advice on the best way to proceed in this situation, assuming that a classic Burtonwood is thought desirable.

[Stromer]

Hi Connieguy

I sent him a letter on the e-mail.

[connieguy]

Many thanks, Stromer. 2008 is quite a long time ago, and he may simply no longer be around.

[Stromer]

I want to have this scenery too.

I already wanted to do it using ADE, what to do is similar to the AFB of those years.

[okami]

It always surprises me a bit that this scenery has been overseen - but Ian Elliot actually did a 1950s FS9 version for RAF Burtonwood a decade or so ago, and it's been available ever since on Sim Outhouse (SOH - look for 'RAF Burtonwood.zip')

RAF Burtonwood actually would have seen civilian traffic in 1957: at the time, the runway at Manchester was being expanded, leaving it unavailable to BOAC's trans-Atlantic flights, so BOAC had a daily service running through Burtonwood (London-Heathrow - Burtonwood - Glasgow-Prestwick - New York per DC-7C, and London-Heathrow - Burtonwood - Glasgow-Prestwick - Gander - Montreal per Stratocruiser)

www.timetableimages.com/ttimages/ba2/ba57/ba57-03.jpg

[connieguy]

Okami,
Thank you very much. Obviously, I did not know about this. If you download it from Sim Outhouse and install you will find it in FS under BTW1. I attach a screenshot which reveals serious problems, at least on my system. However, from your screenshot it clearly works with the default scenery and mesh. The absent sections of runway and airport on my machine I think must be because I have a different mesh. Glenn's scenery was perhaps a little more detailed, and I shall stick with what I have, but Ian's is clearly very useful, is very easily acquired and may well satisfy the vast majority of people. Thanks again.

[okami]

Aug 8, 2018 14:42:49 GMT -5 connieguy said:

Okami,
Thank you very much. Obviously, I did not know about this. If you download it from Sim Outhouse and install you will find it in FS under BTW1. I attach a screenshot which reveals serious problems, at least on my system. However, from your screenshot it clearly works with the default scenery and mesh. The absent sections of runway and airport on my machine I think must be because I have a different mesh. Glenn's scenery was perhaps a little more detailed, and I shall stick with what I have, but Ian's is clearly very useful, is very easily acquired and may well satisfy the vast majority of people. Thanks again.

Hi,

It seems like your mesh has slightly different altitudes for some of the terrain - the runway sections aren't missing but just 'blend into' the ground. Normally it should work if you put the Burtonwood scenery above the local replacement mesh; if not, you can try and force the terrain down by adding a polygon in Afcad that follows the exact contours of the runways.

[connieguy]

Thank you. I know there are ways of dealing with these issues but I have invested quite a lot of time in terms of adding things like vehicles and people to my version of Burtonwood and will stick with it. I have flown there quite a lot since having it. However, the Elliott version does have the 1950s control tower and if I was starting with it again it would be on the basis of his Burtonwood rather than Glen Broome's. Fortunately there is now no need to be concerned about how to re-issue my re-working of the latter, because it is not necessary for me to do that. What this illustrates is how easy it is to miss important things if they are not on Flightsim, Tom's scenery pages and Robert-Jan Osterloo's scenery listing site. When I get a little time I shall go through what is available on Sim Outhouse fairly carefully.

[ianelliot]

Blimey, were going back a few year's. Feel free to do with the scenery as you wish, you can chop or change or whatever to make it fit better into the CC world, most of the core RAF buildings are the same as the Ted Andrew's objects in the present CC object Library's, but by now, there's probably better secondary object's (vehicles, ground equip, smaller buildings ect ) that can be used in the present librarys. Whatever you want to do, im OK with it

[connieguy]

Good to hear from you, Ian. I suppose the truth is that things tend to move rather slowly in the world of FS9, but at any rate having now looked at Sim Outhouse more carefully you have other things there which I am sure would be of interest to some on this forum, perhaps especially RAF Habbaniyah (Iraq) and Gan (Indian Ocean). I have downloaded RAF Khormaksar (now Aden International) and also your RAF support vehicles, which I think could profitably be added to the classic libraries. All very useful and thank you.

[Tom/CalClassic]

Hi,

Happy to add any of Ian’s libraries to the classic package if desired. And I can also add Aden if it’s modified to accept the classic AI traffic (parking spots, etc.)

[okami]

Aug 10, 2018 2:11:19 GMT -5 ianelliot said:

Blimey, were going back a few year's. Feel free to do with the scenery as you wish, you can chop or change or whatever to make it fit better into the CC world, most of the core RAF buildings are the same as the Ted Andrew's objects in the present CC object Library's, but by now, there's probably better secondary object's (vehicles, ground equip, smaller buildings ect ) that can be used in the present librarys. Whatever you want to do, im OK with it

Would be more than happy to take you up on that. It might be a good exercise for me as I haven't done scenery for a while now, not since my previous computer catastrophically failed with about a decade of work lost.

From what I found on the internet, the ICAO code for Burtonwood was EGOB.

Since the scenery's original issue a lot of new AI aircraft have also become available, so perhaps it's worth painting up John Young's B-29 as a 'replacement' WB-50 weather reconnaissance plane.

[ianelliot]

Cheers guy's, be careful with RAF Khormaksar, i did at least 2 update's for FSX, The best version for FS9-CC is in the SOH Library dated 30/1/13. RAF Khormaksar_HMS Fearless_v2.zip.( again, it might be worth swapping out some objects for newer CC-Lib alternative's ) I had a lot of problems getting Khormaksar to work in FSX, for some reason the mesh and coastline's in FS9 in some areas seem to be much better represented, i do miss that in FSX.
As for JY B29's that would be site, and how about his B36 Peacemaker, i believe they visited Burtonwood on occasion

[jagdflieger]

"Ian Elliot."

That's a name that I haven't seen in a while. He made some outstanding scenery many years ago and in my CFS 2 days they were used often. I'd love to see his efforts uploaded here and perhaps updated by some of the gurus here.

Glad to see you here Ian.

[jwh]

Installed this scenery last night and have had no problems with runway elevations etc. Really nice scenery and the York doesn't look out of place.