Kraków-Balice (EPKK) is an international airport located near Kraków, in the village of Balice, 11 km (6.8 miles) west of the Kraków city center, in southern Poland. It is the second busiest airport in the country in terms of the volume of passengers served annually.
Although we received a free review copy from FlyDesign, don’t worry, it will not affect our review. If we don’t like something about the product, you will know it.
Terminal building
FlyDesign did a really good job modelling the terminal building from outside, but the glass panels are adding a kind of weird feeling to the terminal. This is mainly caused because FlyDesign did not use when modelling the terminal glass material, but used pictures of glass panels with reflections, and interior instead. You can get used to it, but it would be much nicer if they modelled the terminal with glass material and included an interior instead, in fact, if you look closer at other FlyDesign sceneries, a modelled interior can be considered as a standard. But overall, the terminal looks very well, especially from the runway side.
Runway, taxiways and gates
The airport features a layout from 2018 and overall very nice ground textures. As you can see on screenshots below, the ground textures have really good resolution, are very detailed, and overall look very good as mentioned earlier.
FlyDesign included some nice and some weird static objects. As you can see below, the car and the Ryanair 737-800 are looking kind of weird, but the Lufthansa A320 looks awesome. Not sure if the aircrafts are part of a library, but I personally think, that it would be much better to have all static aircrafts on the scenery look as good as the Lufthansa A320 does.
Grass and trees
While installing the scenery you will get an option between multiple scenery options, if you pick one of the two which feature grass you will not regret since FlyDesign included a very nice looking grass in the scenery and very accurately placed trees. The problem is, that it’s, of course, more demanding on your PC. If you have a mid-range PC, I recommend selecting the one without grass.
Bugs and problems
What I consider as something which can ruin the experience for someone is the road system next to the terminal. Also, FlyDesign did not modelled all the roads, but left the photo scenery as a background in some parts of the scenery. Also, in one part of the scenery is the orthophoto background overlapping the road.
There is also known bug, that there are some objects floating about 2 meters above the ground in the scenery. I personally found two objects in the scenery. This is not something major, but would be nice fixed.
Overall, there is a decent amount of bugs that should be fixed as soon as possible, and they will, hopefully 🙂
Road below the orthophoto 
Train dissapearing in the middle of the road 
Floating building
Krakow city
The scenery does feature modelled city of Krakow, but I would say, that it was not FlyDesigns main interest while creating this scenery. I personally think that FlyDesign should focus more on the city itself since I found only few custom modelled buildings, and I feel like it’s a kind of a lost opportunity.
The city scenery is optional and you can choose whether you want to install it or not. The same thing applies to seasons.
Seasons
The scenery does feature two seasons, you can choose between winter season and summer season. We reviewed only the summer season, but we found screenshots on FlyDesign Facebook page of the winter season which you can see below.
Manual and Charts
FlyDesign included a manual that will help you with the installation on MAC and Windows and introduce you to the scenery and airport itself.
Installation
All parts of the scenery are very easily installed via an installer included in the compressed file which you get after the successful purchase of the scenery. The complete process of the installation can be seen below (ex. few details like agreement and game folder selection)
Airport
krakow city
seasons
Conclusion
In conclusion, FlyDesign made really good scenery for the price. Of course, there are some problems like FPS issues on slower machines, or bugs which I mentioned earlier, but it’s something that can be fixed and I hope it will be fixed. But overall I find this scenery very good and worth the value.
You can purchase the scenery for 15€ via FlyDesign store or for 22,87€ via Simmarket.
Features
- EPKK International airport, completely new HD buildings with all detailed
- New Terminal, Tower, Hangars buildings
- Military Apron included (8th Airlift Base) with static aircraft, C295M and F-16 Polish Air Force
- Animated jetways and docking guidance system Autogate by Marginal
- High resolution ground textures.
- Hand-placed vegetation, and 3D lighting
- Animated custom ground vehicles
- Optimized for excellent performance
- EPKK charts by LIDO
Screenshots
Here are some additionals screenshots of the scenery, feel free to check them out.
Version reviewed: 1.5
