Heraklion Airport is Crete's main gateway to
the world. Officially known as the Heraklion Nikos Kazantzakis
International Airport, it is located about 5 km (3 miles) east
of the main city of Heraklion, near the municipality of Nea
Alikarnassos. The airport was built in 1937 and the first
passenger carrying plane did not land until 1939; this was a
Junkers 52 carrying 14 passengers. The airport is now Greece's
second busiest airport, after Athens International Airport. From
its opening in 1937, it now serves 5 million passengers a year.
Heraklion also operates as a military airport.
There are over 66 airlines that operate out of Heraklion. They
can all be found listed on the this
link
Any information that you could require regarding
flight information, is available from this
site
Performance
The performance on my system was very reasonable and with the configuration tools that are shown below. HeraklionX can be tailored to suit your own system’s performance by deactivating areas of autogen, animations and scenery, such as parked cars and some 3D objects.
I also found that even with night lighting I still had a very reasonable performance. Based on my medium performance rated system, there is no doubt that with an high end system this will run very smoothly.
Detail
Aerosoft have done an excellent job of recreating the airport, city and surrounding area. It is a very accurate rendition of Heraklion and Kazantzakis International Airport. When comparing it with satellite images, there is no doubt how accurate it is. The detailed airport buildings have a realistic look about them, with nice textures and very impressive mix of light and shadow. The runway textures are of the quality which you would expect from today’s software developers. The airport vehicles are a real treat, probably some of the most realistic I have seen.
The night lighting is very realistic and rounds the package off nicely. The control tower rotating light sweeps across the airport with very realistic lighting effects. The car park lighting, runway lights and general airport lights look just as realistic. The blue taxiway marker lights reflect onto the floor, and the taxiway marker boards look nice and clear. The city lighting is well balanced and I could not identify I any negative aspects at all.
Airport apron night lighting |
Car park night lighting |
Night light airport rear |
City lights |
Taxiway lights |
Runway night lighting |
My only criticisms are that I found that the PAPI lights tend to merge into each other, making them difficult to see even when you get quite close, The textures of the grass/sand between the runway and taxiway were not up to the same standard as the other textures around the airport which was a little disappointing.
Runway and taxiway grass |
PAPI |
Animations
The animations are nicely done with smooth movement. The city traffic moves at a realistic speed and there is plenty of it. I did notice that some of the traffic disappeared in certain areas but it was only a minor point and not really noticeable unless looking for it. The airport vehicles moved smoothly, along with the seagulls and boats.
Conclusion
This is a very nice scenery package. It looks good and there are plenty of options to help get a good performance to suit your own computer’s performance.
The textures and fantastic night lighting give it a very realistic look and it is very accurate as far as I can tell from photos. The only negative aspects are that I think that the PAPI lights could have been a bit clearer; after all there is no ILS.
Once you touch down the first thing you see is the space between the runway and taxiway, where there could have been better textures with more 3D textures visible. However balanced against the many positive aspects noted earlier.
Verdict
I think overall it is an excellent package, giving you
the airport, city and surrounding area at a very reasonable
price. It is more than well worth having.
• Level of detail: • Performance: • Scenery Coverage: • Quality of buildings (if applicable) • Documentation: • Value for money: |
8.5/10 10 /10 10 /10 9.5/10 10 /10 10 /10 |
Final Mutley's Hangar Score 9/10
John Stevens
Review machine Spec: Intel i5 3.10Ghz
| 4Gb DDR2 Ram |GeForce 9800GTX |Windows 7 64bit
|