Modifying airport elevation

There are at least some cases in FS X where the elevation of an airport in the default scenery does not match the elevation given in more or less official documents like aviation databases or government sources. If this difference is more than a few feet and you want to improve the situation, you will face three different jobs: - adjustment of the mesh; - adjustment of the airport background; - adjustment of the airport.

Adjustment of the mesh

With some possible exceptions the airport elevation in the FS X scenery files matches the elevation of the surrounding terrain. Thus there would be no point in correcting the airport without having the mesh corrected too. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain how you can produce a more correct mesh; I asssume that you are able to download a better suited mesh from one of the usual fs sites (if you have not already done one yourself). After you have installed that corrected mesh your airport will either sit on a mesa-like mountain or in a deep hole - depending on whether it was situated to low or to high.

Making a new airport background

In FS X you will have to make a new cvx*.bgl file to adjust the airport background. In order to obtain that file you have to make a group of shapefiles as input for the program shp2vec.exe which you find in the FS X SDK. At present there are essentially two utilities which will help you to produce these shapefiles: you can either use FSX KLM for which you can find a manual in this Wiki or you can use xml2shp.exe which you can find as an attachement in a thread in the SceneryDesign section of this site.