How ADE Airports Work with FSX

Visible Model and Facility Model

There are two types of data used to model an airport in FSX. There is the visible scenery model and the invisible facility model.

• The visible model contains scenery objects such as runways, taxiways and buildings. It is for the user to ‘see’ only, FSX knows almost nothing about the airport from the visible model.

• The facility model contains virtually everything that FSX knows about the airport including location name, ICAO code, comm frequencies, runway data, taxiway and parking maps, etc. This information appears in the Map View, GPS, FS Go To Airport window and Flight Planner window. It is also used by ATC and AI to operate at an airport. The facility model contains much of the information found in published airport facility documents.

 

Both types of   data are stored in a .bgl file.   It is important to understand that making changes to what appears to be the visible model can cause serious problems for the facilities model.

 

Replacing Stock Airports with ADE files

When you modify an airport with ADE and compile it, it produces a replacement .bgl file for that airport. This file has an exclusion mechanism that causes it to override   most of the elements in the stock airport.   ADE will create exclusions for airport elements and many of the scenery objects that are found at the airport automatically.   This will occur for both visual and facility models of that airport. This means that the stock airport is still in FSX unmodified but the ADE airport contains information that tells FSX to ignore what is in the stock airport file and use what is in the ADE file instead.