Rick Desjardins flew to France to review FranceVFR’s scenery of  Strasbourg Entzheim LFST for FS2004: “ My next review takes me to the Alsace region of France to the small regional airport of LFST Strasbourg- Entzheim. The airport is located in eastern France near the border with Germany just southwest of the city of Strasbourg and next to the village of Entzheim. It is a beautiful rural area with lots of farm lands interspersed with quaint villages. Great for VFR flying! …/…
Installation
The download was quick at only 59Mb, this is not a very large file when compared to many other file downloads today. The installation was very simple, add your registration information, select your language of choice and follow the prompts. The last step in the installation process adds the new scenery to the scenery library so the next time you start FS2004 you are ready to select the airport and fly. The manual provides the locations and names of any folders created or written to.
Configuration and set up
The configuration is straight forward; you want to set your scenery complexity and autogen density to very dense or extremely dense to be able to see all of the added objects in and around the airport. Apart from that there is really nothing to do but select your favourite aircraft and enjoy.
Documentation
The documentation is quite extensive for this airport. You have a scenery manual that outlines such things as technical specs, installation directories, recommended display settings, etc and then there are four other documents that include such detailed information as airport and terrain charts, SID/STAR procedures, parking stand allocations, etc. All in all they are quite extensive.
Flying the scenery
For my exploratory flight around the scenery I chose a Cessna U206. Sitting in the pilot’s seat parked in front of the main terminal building you got the sense of being at an actual airport, the transparent glass windows of the terminal and jet ways are a very nice touch. Looking around you are presented with more of what you’d expect to see in real life, a variety of airport vehicles such as buses, pushback vehicles, cargo, and of course other aircraft. Overall I was very pleased. It gave you the impression of actually being there. There are no moving vehicles included in this scenery. Taxiing out to the single 2400 meter runway you could see even more subtle details such as parked cars behind the terminal building, chain link fencing, area lighting, runway indicators and lights on the taxi way. Taking off from rwy 05 climbing slowly towards the north you get a good sense of the over all layout of the airport. At either end of the runway there are what appears to be hardened shelters that I presume would be used by aircraft of the French Air Force. A say presume because there were no aircraft in any of these areas.
The use of photoreal textures throughout gives the area a very realistic look but on the downside you see a distinct border where this scenery and the default meet. Flying over head and looking around or approaching the airport it was unmistakable.
Final Thoughts
This scenery is very easy on the frame rates with little to no impact. I thoroughly enjoyed the package. Whether I was parked at the terminal or flying around the area enjoying the rural countryside this airport is a winner in my books and I highly recommend it.
My Ratings:
- Installer: Very Good
- Documentation: Very Good
- Modeling: Images were optimized for best frame rates
- Extras: Exploratory flights to enjoy the area
Download Size: 59 Mb
Price: EUR 14.20 (+VAT where applicable)
Developer: www.francevfr.com
Purchase Link: http://secure.simmarket.com/francevfr-strasbourg-entzheim-lfst-fs2004.phtml
Test System:
Intel i7 920 @ 2.66Ghz, 6 Gb RAM, 8800 GT 512Mb video card, Win XP x64 SP2, FS2004 with UT and GEPro
Richard Desjardins
