NFTP – Mata’aho Airport – Niuatoputapu, Tonga v1.0
NFTP – Mata’aho Airport, Tonga
Version 1.0; September 2021
Hello everyone,
for my third scenery I´m going back to Tonga – mainly because I wanted to give you something to fly to from my NFTO / Niuafo’ou scenery. Niuatoputapu is the second of three islands belonging to the Niuas island group
in the northernmost part of the Kingdom of Tonga. Its airport – if you can call it that – is a dirt strip on the south coast of the small island which only sees irregular support flights or chartered flights every few
weeks, as with NFTO it has no regular scheduled flights. Although both islands belong to the same group they´re very different. Niuatoputapu is a tropical island paradise surrounded by a beautiful coral reef while Niuafo’ou is more rough and barren, with large lava fields and less vegetation. With a small to medium GA plane you can get from one island to the other in little more than an hour, great for small evening flights.
NFTP doesn´t exist in the simulator’s database by default so I had to create it from scratch. I only found seven (!) photos on the internet from different time periods as resource material, so there was a lot of
guesswork involved and some of the things you´ll see are more a result of my imagination than actual representation of the real world, but I tried to be accurate where possible and to capture the general look and feelof a small island airport.
The airport is a dirt strip with a single runway (11/29) ; dimensions are 3937 x 98 feet / 1200 x 30 meters
Scenery features:
– LOD 17 aerial image for the whole island, converted and color-corrected from Google satellite imagery. The default Bing maps image is full of clouds and green tinted stains, half of the actual airport is hidden beneath clouds, so I had to include the custom imagery (although you can remove it separately to save disk space if you like, the aerial image alone is around 800 MB, while the airport is around 120 MB)
– Custom terminal building with full PBR materials and some smaller custom objects around the airport (fences, signs)
– Custom SimObjects: Harbin Y-12 static aircraft with Real Tonga Airlines livery , although no longer in use in the real airline, which in fact seems to have gone bankrupt and ceased operations last year if I understand correctly.
Custom animated 3D people (passengers, ramp agent, security guard) with time-dependent visibilty, for example passengers and ramp agent only visible during daytime, security guard only at night)
– tweaked grass density at the aiport, removed high grass on the dirt strip.
– tweaked vegetation around the aiport, bushes and small shrubs adjacent to the runway, dense forests where it was missing on some parts of the island.
Limitations: The coral reef around the island is part of the aerial image but does not show up below the water – I tried excluding the water to make the reef visible but then there is a dry, water-free area around the island and that looked strange from up close. I haven´t found a way to create custom watermasks.
Installation:
just copy the two folder (tgd-nftp and tgd-nftpaerial) into your Community folder
GPS Coordinates: -15.97686041998944, -173.791847541144
