There is probably no city where you see more aviation than Los Angeles. Not only are there several major airports close to the city but general aviation rules the skies over the city. Besides Alaska there is no state where single engine aircraft are more used and there are more helipads than in any other city.
That’s not only because of the rich and famous but also because the layout of the city looks spectacular. From the coastline to the mountains around the city, LA is a great city to see from above.
US Cities X is a series of city scenery for FSX that covers US cities created by LimeSim. Based on an extensive aerial image it will have all the major buildings and landmarks plus all the airports and heliports that are inside the covered areas. It is clearly intended to fill the gap between the default scenery and very high dense city scenery such as Manhattan X, London VFR or Venice X. Because the file size is rather large due to the ground image it only includes one season (in most cases this is not a real issue) and no night textures. The VFR flights over these cities are mostly a day time affair anyway.
Features:
Detailed 3D renderings of the 3 city centers covered by more than 5,000 major buildings:
LA Downtown
Long Beach
Irvine/Santa Ana
Aerial image coverage with up to 30cm/pix resolution (see attached Google Earth file)
Bonus: Full rendering of Catalina Island with and helipad!
Detailed scenery of Catalina’s “Airport in the Sky” with sloped runway!
More than 1,050 major buildings included
454,500 (!) autogen objects placed realistically
Highly detailed and customized mesh terrain
An incredible number of 150 helipads! Among them a few well-known ones as:
LAPD Hooper Heliport (largest rooftop heliport in the world. Set location of the "BlueThunder" movie and series)
Catalina Island Pebbly Beach Seaplane Base and Heliport
Major airports in and around the city are covered with new high res ground images with customized mesh terrain (no new building structures added with the exception of KAVX):
KLAX Los Angeles Intl
KBUR Burbank Bob Hope
KSNA John Wayne Orange Co
KLGB Long Beach
KVNY Van Nuys
KAVX Catalina "Airport in the Sky"
KSMO Santa Monica Mun
KSLI Los Alamitos AAF
KWHP Whiteman
KEMT El Monte
KHHR Northrop Hawthorne
KCPM Compton Woodley
KTOA Zamperini
64CL Goodyear Blimp Base
KNTK Tustin MCAS
Sound effects like downtown- and highway traffic and animated gulls
Animated ships and boats between LA Port and Catalina Island
Traffic on most major roads
Low price, very good value for money. Just to compare the features of Los Angeles to the average numbers of previous US Cities:
30 times as many helipads!
More than 2 times as many airports!
More than 5 times as many autogen objects!
More than 3 times as many major buildings!
Includes a separate Scenery Density Tool, which makes this highly detailed scenery enjoyable on slower systems as well!
Save your money. It doesn't seem like much time, thought, or detail was put into this product. It reminds me of a poor quality export from google earth. Time wasn't even taken to align textures properly on some buildings. Also, it doesn't seem optimized very well, performance was very poor relative to other similar products on my particular system.
Für mich persönlich die beste Scenery die Aerosoft bis jetzt heraus gebracht hat.LA ist wunderschön gemacht und an der Küste kann man fast auf jedem Wolkenkratzer mit dem Heli landen usw.
Und der Catalina Airport auf der Insel ist bei der Landung eine echte Herausvorderung für jeden Piloten.Zudem ist der Preis von 20,00 € eh ein Schnäpchen..........also unbedingt kaufen! :-)
A difficult animal to depict. Aerosoft has taken a vast urban area and tried to make the best of it at a low price. And a nice job they have done. Compared to default... super job! I have KLAX from FSDT and it blends in very well, my GA Cessna flight to Van Nuys, and then to Catalina was shear pleasure to fly compared to the default, absolutely great to see the urban areas below, and the island was well depicted.
Since it is a huge area I will not complain on all the 'missing' custom buildings, better to focus on all that are actually there, because there a lot of good landmarks to choose from.
One star off as I saw quite some flickering on a few textures when flying to the south of KLAX, which is irritating on daytime VFR flights.
Anyway, if you like the LA area, like I do... this add on is warmly recommeded for the price. Just missing the heat of all the choppers over LA and hoping some AI addon could fill the skies with them, but that's another story.