Rochester Airport

Rochester Airport is a quaint and vibrant airfield which sits on a rise above the River Medway, just outside the historic towns of Rochester and Chatham, North Kent. Rochester Airport has an incredibly rich history dating back to 1933 when the Short Brothers famed for their flying boats elected to conduct test flights and ultimately built a factory at the newly created airfield. Throughout the Short Brother’s tenure they built and tested aircraft at Rochester such as the Short S.29 Stirling heavy bomber and iconic Short S.25 Sunderland, known as the “Flying Porcupine”.

Throughout the Second World War, The Short Brothers continued to manufacture aircraft at Rochester to help with the war effort. The airport also housed the No. 23 Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School RAF, flying Avro Tutors. Throughout the early part of war, the Rochester Airport was targeted by the Luftwaffe, and on one occasion a successful raid managed to cripple Short Sterling heavy bomber production by over a year.

After the war Rochester Airport changed hands several times and throughout the 1950’s and 60’s Channel Airways operated Douglas DC-3s and de Havilland Doves from the airport for their cross channel charters.

Today Rochester Airport is in a process of rejuvenation and is in somewhat of a transition. A lot of the old buildings from the 1930’s are still in place at Rochester and the stark contrast between the old and the new is something to behold. New buildings and a modern apron are being built and the old 16/34 runway has been decommissioned leaving 02/20 as the only active runway with a proposal to upgrade it to an all-weather surface in the future. Rochester hosts a large variety of general aviation aircraft along with a fixed wing flying school and an popular Autogyro flying school. The Kent, Surrey & Sussex Air Ambulance is based a Rochester Airport and it is common to see their helicopters buzzing around the airport.

Rochester Airport has been recreated faithfully over many hundreds of hours by Burning Blue Design’s modellers and coders with on-site visits, and features:

• Over 90 custom 3D objects have been created exclusively for Rochester Airport, each with full Physical Based Rendering (PBR) allowing for far more realistic textures.
• There are thousands of carefully placed stock assets, every cone, shed, fence post and weed, along with an assortment of ground workers has been placed in the correct location ensuring an atmosphere of a working airfield.
• High resolution colour corrected ground textures taken from Bing maps and manipulated for consistency and realism which far surpasses the quality of the stock Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 ground texture.
• Working custom Windsock.
• Actual aircraft from the have been included around the airport:
  • Air Ambulance – Leonardo AW169 – Registration G-KSST.
  • Air Ambulance – MD 902 – Registration G-KAAT.
  • Autogyro – 915is Cavalon – Registration G-OSVN.
• Full night lighting placed across the airfield and within and around the hangars and buildings.
• Correct AI pattern procedures and accurate taxiway and runway placement have been incorporated into the release.
• The surrounding area has been enhanced, this includes:
  • The Medway Innovation Centre.
  • The Kent, Surrey & Sussex Air Ambulance HQ building.
  • BAE Systems Rochester
  • Horsted Retail park including it’s superstores, fast-food resturants and hotels, all of which are visible from the airport.
  • Roads around the airfield have been improved with correct markings and colours, this includes the M2 motorway.
  • The surrounding industrial and retail estates have been updated to match their real life counterparts.

Once you have purchased and downloaded the product, double click on the zip file to open it. You should see the airport’s folder inside, this will need to be extracted and placed into your Microsoft Flight Simulator Community folder, if you don’t know where the community folder is, we have a full guide on how to install our packages here.

If you still have trouble locating your community folder this easy to follow video will help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhSkMzWLFR0

There is also a community tool called ModmanFX which makes installing and removing Microsoft Flight Simulator packages incredibly easy, you can get it here: https://www.msfsaddons.org/freeware/modmanfx

• Due to a bug introduced in Sim Update 12, default Bing ground textures can sometimes be displayed instead of the custom aerial images included in our scenery. Asobo has acknowledged this issue but have not confirmed when this will be resolved.
• Transparent and translucent glass panes can appear very dark when subject to particle effects such as rain, snow and fog. This is a known bug that Asobo/Microsoft are aware of and will fix in the near future.

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Recommended

Further Information and Licensing:

A number of the static aircraft used within the scenery were 3D models used under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The models were reskinned to match their real life contemporaries. For further information and full attribution on any of the individual models please contact us here: https://burningbluedesign.com/contact/

Creative Commons License