Airport Design Editor for FSX and P3D

#1 · December 15, 2017, 11:05 am

Quote from Hangar45 Admin on December 15, 2017, 11:05 am
(Original thread started on 09-25-09 by Shane Barnes)

I've been using this freeware program for a couple weeks. I have updated my local airport to how it looks today as FSX version did not have a couple of taxiways, hangars in wrong location, added parking as FSX had none, relocated the fuel box to correct location etc. I was also able to add in details such as vehicles, static aircraft, and other misc. objects to add life to my airport.

I thought that if all of us update our airports to closely resemble the real thing we should be able to share airport files, so for example Eric updates his airport file sends it to me. Then when I fly into his airport, I will see a better representation of his home airport.

Everything I have read about this program should allow us to share airport folders. I think this program is capable of much more than I have listed, even to the point of adding an airport that is not in FSX

I do like that the program has a very short learning curve. Try one of the tutorials and you will be on your way to updating your airport in a couple hours. You can find a link to ADE HERE

Please post all ADE question, comments, reports or screen shots in this thread.

(Posted by Tom Goldberg on 06-26-10)

Hey Guys, yes ADE is a good program, another good program which I use a lot is FSX planner, also free to use. It is very simple to learn. You can update all aspects of the airport add scenery buildings etc... I use it a lot to add an ILS approach to an airport you can do this with a couple mouse clicks, just another program you can look at.

(Posted by Ron Rollo on 08-22-15)

About seven months ago, I thought I would expand my sim abilities into the field of tweaking airports and surrounding scenery with a freeware program called ADE. (Airport Design Editor) For a free program, it is pretty advanced with it's abilities! It has a "pro key" that you can purchase to unlock a few more features for around $10 which I went ahead and got for myself. Thanks to Shane for pointing me in this direction!

Shane and I have been talking about tweaking a few airports and I wanted to know if anyone here in the hangar has had any luck with ADE. Several months back I had some luck......all bad luck when my FSX tried to fix itself and ended up not being able to recover. The bad luck had nothing to do with ADE by the way and the bad luck turns out to be a good thing because it forced me into P3D. ADE seemed to be doing what I asked of it but there is just a bit of a learning curve like with most things that we find ourselves getting involved with. With that said, I still have not been able to compile an airport yet, although I have not tried in seven months!

If your not aware, Avsim has hundreds if not thousands of airports that have been redone most of them are freeware. I live in Jacksonville Florida so as of this date, there are no payware versions of any of the airports in northeast Florida. (If you know of any please share!)

Thankfully, Avsim has a data base full of freeware airports. And thankfully for me, there is a fella by the name of Art Poole that has designed my all time favorite airports like KJAX, KSGJ, KPIE to name a few.

The cool thing about these airports is that they look 100 times better than the default FSX/P3D airports, they are freeware and you can improve on them even further if you want to in a program like ADE.

I am determined to learn ADE and hopefully become one of the guys that you all can turn to with questions if you decide to play with ADE yourself. Shane is the only other guy I know of that has any success with ADE so far.

(Posted by Eric Williams on 09-05-15)

I had some good luck with ADE ages ago. I modded my local airport extensively with good results. I am still using the airport as my primary flight location. I remember the main issue I had was with fences. I remember it was not intuitive for setting them as I wanted. Beyond that it worked pretty great.

I also modded the AI traffic as well with another freeware program. Check out the video:

https://youtu.be/2SmqyoJg5m0

Hopefully it helps someone. Just dive in with ADE. Making my local airport exactly how I desired was definitely worth the time spent learning the tricks. Lots of YT videos showing how to edit. Glad I did it.

One thing has always bothered me since I first purchased FS years ago is my local airport design. I have installed many addon sceneries but nothing seemed to correct the design of my local favorite airport. I thought I'd share a quick and easy way for you to edit your favorite airport as well.

Download the Freeware program called Airport Design Editor HERE

It allows for object placement and editing of the entire airport. It is a CAD style program which is fairly intuitive but also has a 150+ page manual if you need help.

Also go over to Avsim and download the "Big Thumbs Pack" and use it as the thumbnail library in ADE. This makes things much easier as you will now have a picture for each object in ADE.

Now I haven't made my airport perfectly scale just yet as I does take some time, but I was able to easily import a satellite picture into ADE and set up the basics of my layout to scale- also added some extra parking and taxi routes/nodes (these were missing originally) so I could utilize the next program...

Now with a semi functional airport I have always been missing something else- traffic. With a nice little freeware program called AI Flight Planner I was now able to schedule flights to and from my airport at any time I wished. Check it out HERE

There are a few YouTube videos on the program such as the one below- but it is a fairly intuitive process. Pick your departure airport, aircraft, time and cruising alt etc then repeat for each leg until you return the AI aircraft to it's original departure airport- simple.

https://youtu.be/CkwCpGwa-Ac

I used my office PC with a basic install of FSX and scenery so I can easily mess with the files etc. Once I get them where I like I simply copy them over to my main FSX PC in the cockpit. So far I can finally start at my local airport, see something that actually looks familiar, and know exactly when an AI aircraft is going to fire up and taxi, or come inbound for landing. It's actually kinda just fun to watch them come and go a bit. Also now have birds flying around etc... much better than Ultimate Terrain or any other so far.

(Posted by Steve Cooke on 09-08-15)

I've looked at it a while back and actually wanted to get into modding my one of the two airports within 3 miles of me. The one right down the street wouldn't be able to accommodate the LJ but I like flying my A2A 172 out of there. The other one KMYV would be perfect for the LJ. Need to add my own private hangar.

(Posted by Ron Rollo on 09-08-15)

ADE is the way to go if you want to design or improve your local airport, however, it has a learning curve, like everything else. I'm still learning so I can't help too much ATM, but like I said before, I want to be able to use ADE like second nature. Read up on it. It is free to try and use. You would only spend $10 if you wanted the ProKey.

You can read about ADE HERE and down load it if you want to give it a try.

(Posted by Randy Buchanan on 09-09-15)

I am wondering how we might show our work if we can fix up our local airport. I guess we can all look at our airports before we do any kind of work on them. Like I am going to fly over to take a look at KJAX and KYMV So Jeff which airport do you like? Or Alan get off the couch and tell us your pet airport. We shall see.

(Posted by Ron Rollo on 09-09-15)

If you have not seen it yet, you need to browse through the Avsim website and see what airports you might be interested in around your area. There are tons of files for local airports and even airplane repaints for several of the military bases in my area. Some of these airports were created in ADE.

As an example, take a look at some of these airport remakes of (KJAX) Jacksonville International HERE.

Also, if you search for "Jacksonville Florida" you will see all the nearby airports in or around Jacksonville including Navy airplane remakes. Pretty cool stuff!

Search your own area and see what you come up with. In most cases, if you find an airport you like and it was created in ADE, you can modify it further in ADE if you know something is missing or needs a little fixing. Again, as an example, the airport runways at KJAX have changed and Art Poole who made the updates did a great job, but he forgot to change the runway taxi sign! An easy fix in ADE.

(Posted by Genoroof on 04-11-16)

In my recent down time due to my computer taking a permanent vacation, I found a great tutorial on Airport Design Editor by Countryflyboy over on YouTube. It’s an eleven part series where he remakes Vidalia Regional airport (KVDI) from start to finish. I found it very informative! The series really shed some much needed light on how to use this wonderful program.

https://youtu.be/2aovserwt5U

(Original thread started on 09-25-09 by Shane Barnes)

I've been using this freeware program for a couple weeks. I have updated my local airport to how it looks today as FSX version did not have a couple of taxiways, hangars in wrong location, added parking as FSX had none, relocated the fuel box to correct location etc. I was also able to add in details such as vehicles, static aircraft, and other misc. objects to add life to my airport.

I thought that if all of us update our airports to closely resemble the real thing we should be able to share airport files, so for example Eric updates his airport file sends it to me. Then when I fly into his airport, I will see a better representation of his home airport.

Everything I have read about this program should allow us to share airport folders. I think this program is capable of much more than I have listed, even to the point of adding an airport that is not in FSX

I do like that the program has a very short learning curve. Try one of the tutorials and you will be on your way to updating your airport in a couple hours. You can find a link to ADE HERE

Please post all ADE question, comments, reports or screen shots in this thread.

(Posted by Tom Goldberg on 06-26-10)

Hey Guys, yes ADE is a good program, another good program which I use a lot is FSX planner, also free to use. It is very simple to learn. You can update all aspects of the airport add scenery buildings etc... I use it a lot to add an ILS approach to an airport you can do this with a couple mouse clicks, just another program you can look at.

(Posted by Ron Rollo on 08-22-15)

About seven months ago, I thought I would expand my sim abilities into the field of tweaking airports and surrounding scenery with a freeware program called ADE. (Airport Design Editor) For a free program, it is pretty advanced with it's abilities! It has a "pro key" that you can purchase to unlock a few more features for around $10 which I went ahead and got for myself. Thanks to Shane for pointing me in this direction!

Shane and I have been talking about tweaking a few airports and I wanted to know if anyone here in the hangar has had any luck with ADE. Several months back I had some luck......all bad luck when my FSX tried to fix itself and ended up not being able to recover. The bad luck had nothing to do with ADE by the way and the bad luck turns out to be a good thing because it forced me into P3D. ADE seemed to be doing what I asked of it but there is just a bit of a learning curve like with most things that we find ourselves getting involved with. With that said, I still have not been able to compile an airport yet, although I have not tried in seven months!

If your not aware, Avsim has hundreds if not thousands of airports that have been redone most of them are freeware. I live in Jacksonville Florida so as of this date, there are no payware versions of any of the airports in northeast Florida. (If you know of any please share!)

Thankfully, Avsim has a data base full of freeware airports. And thankfully for me, there is a fella by the name of Art Poole that has designed my all time favorite airports like KJAX, KSGJ, KPIE to name a few.

The cool thing about these airports is that they look 100 times better than the default FSX/P3D airports, they are freeware and you can improve on them even further if you want to in a program like ADE.

I am determined to learn ADE and hopefully become one of the guys that you all can turn to with questions if you decide to play with ADE yourself. Shane is the only other guy I know of that has any success with ADE so far.

(Posted by Eric Williams on 09-05-15)

I had some good luck with ADE ages ago. I modded my local airport extensively with good results. I am still using the airport as my primary flight location. I remember the main issue I had was with fences. I remember it was not intuitive for setting them as I wanted. Beyond that it worked pretty great.

I also modded the AI traffic as well with another freeware program. Check out the video:

Hopefully it helps someone. Just dive in with ADE. Making my local airport exactly how I desired was definitely worth the time spent learning the tricks. Lots of YT videos showing how to edit. Glad I did it.

One thing has always bothered me since I first purchased FS years ago is my local airport design. I have installed many addon sceneries but nothing seemed to correct the design of my local favorite airport. I thought I'd share a quick and easy way for you to edit your favorite airport as well.

Download the Freeware program called Airport Design Editor HERE

It allows for object placement and editing of the entire airport. It is a CAD style program which is fairly intuitive but also has a 150+ page manual if you need help.

Also go over to Avsim and download the "Big Thumbs Pack" and use it as the thumbnail library in ADE. This makes things much easier as you will now have a picture for each object in ADE.

Now I haven't made my airport perfectly scale just yet as I does take some time, but I was able to easily import a satellite picture into ADE and set up the basics of my layout to scale- also added some extra parking and taxi routes/nodes (these were missing originally) so I could utilize the next program...

Now with a semi functional airport I have always been missing something else- traffic. With a nice little freeware program called AI Flight Planner I was now able to schedule flights to and from my airport at any time I wished. Check it out HERE

There are a few YouTube videos on the program such as the one below- but it is a fairly intuitive process. Pick your departure airport, aircraft, time and cruising alt etc then repeat for each leg until you return the AI aircraft to it's original departure airport- simple.

I used my office PC with a basic install of FSX and scenery so I can easily mess with the files etc. Once I get them where I like I simply copy them over to my main FSX PC in the cockpit. So far I can finally start at my local airport, see something that actually looks familiar, and know exactly when an AI aircraft is going to fire up and taxi, or come inbound for landing. It's actually kinda just fun to watch them come and go a bit. Also now have birds flying around etc... much better than Ultimate Terrain or any other so far.

(Posted by Steve Cooke on 09-08-15)

I've looked at it a while back and actually wanted to get into modding my one of the two airports within 3 miles of me. The one right down the street wouldn't be able to accommodate the LJ but I like flying my A2A 172 out of there. The other one KMYV would be perfect for the LJ. Need to add my own private hangar.

(Posted by Ron Rollo on 09-08-15)

ADE is the way to go if you want to design or improve your local airport, however, it has a learning curve, like everything else. I'm still learning so I can't help too much ATM, but like I said before, I want to be able to use ADE like second nature. Read up on it. It is free to try and use. You would only spend $10 if you wanted the ProKey.

You can read about ADE HERE and down load it if you want to give it a try.

(Posted by Randy Buchanan on 09-09-15)

I am wondering how we might show our work if we can fix up our local airport. I guess we can all look at our airports before we do any kind of work on them. Like I am going to fly over to take a look at KJAX and KYMV So Jeff which airport do you like? Or Alan get off the couch and tell us your pet airport. We shall see.

(Posted by Ron Rollo on 09-09-15)

If you have not seen it yet, you need to browse through the Avsim website and see what airports you might be interested in around your area. There are tons of files for local airports and even airplane repaints for several of the military bases in my area. Some of these airports were created in ADE.

As an example, take a look at some of these airport remakes of (KJAX) Jacksonville International HERE.

Also, if you search for "Jacksonville Florida" you will see all the nearby airports in or around Jacksonville including Navy airplane remakes. Pretty cool stuff!

Search your own area and see what you come up with. In most cases, if you find an airport you like and it was created in ADE, you can modify it further in ADE if you know something is missing or needs a little fixing. Again, as an example, the airport runways at KJAX have changed and Art Poole who made the updates did a great job, but he forgot to change the runway taxi sign! An easy fix in ADE.

(Posted by Genoroof on 04-11-16)

In my recent down time due to my computer taking a permanent vacation, I found a great tutorial on Airport Design Editor by Countryflyboy over on YouTube. It’s an eleven part series where he remakes Vidalia Regional airport (KVDI) from start to finish. I found it very informative! The series really shed some much needed light on how to use this wonderful program.

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Airport Design Editor for FSX and P3D