Falconara Airport

Aeroporto di Ancona-Falconara
Aeroporto delle Marche "Raffaello Sanzio"

IATA: AOI ICAO: LIPY
Type	public
Owner	Aerdorica S.p.A.
City	Falconara (AN), Italy
website
Runways Runway Length Material 04/22 2965m asphalt, concrete heads
Scenery tile	e013n43
TerraSync	no

Falconara Airport is a small international airport located half way down the east coast of Italy, 18 km west of Ancona.

The airport

LIPY is the only international airport of le Marche region. In 2013 it had a traffic of ~500 000 passengers and ~6 600 tons of goods. It has two separate terminals for arrival/departure of passengers and another cargo terminal area. The control tower is powered by a photovoltaic system. It has an unused military area and hosts 5º Nucleo Elicotteri of the Carabinieri, with an Agusta A109 helicopter.

In 1981 the airport was visited by a Concorde. During the various operations in the Balcans area, for its obvious favourable position, it has been used by military forces with Apaches, UH-60, tankers, A-10, Harriers, and heavy cargos like C-17, C-5, An-124.

A peculiarity of this airport is that 1 km north of it, right on the coast, there is a refinery that can't be overflown.

Structure

The only runway, 04/22, is almost 3 km long, 45 m wide, and it's used also for taxiing, as the taxiway parallel to the runway is off duty. It's used in both directions but only 22 is served by ILS. It has a 0.2% slope towards north-east.

The main apron is located towards the southwest end of the runway. It has 14 parking places, four of which for smaller planes, and the main taxiways are R1 and R2. R3 connects the middle of the runway to the aeroclub and private hangars.

No operations area is present for civil helicopters, that need to take off and land on the runway.

ATC and navigational aids

LIPY is in a class D airspace up to FL115, class G outside CTR zone "1" below 2000 ft. There are APP, TWR and ATIS frequencies.

Navigational aids include VOR-DME and NDB in Ancona, and in Falconara TACAN, DME, locator and ILS.

Aeroclub

Falconara Airport is base of Aeroclub Ancona, which is a Flight Training Organization and owns one C172 SP with Garmin G1000, one C152, one PA28RT-201 Turbo Arrow IV (with retractable gear) and one P92-JS.

Scenery project

Since April 2014 user bigstones has been interested in improving the airport. Models would be provided by a generous MSFS user who made a wonderful scenery no more than few months earlier, with bigstones trying to convert this very detailed scenery while keeping it usable on not-so-powerful machines. The tool used for conversion is ModelConverterX.

Latest update: --Bigstones (talk) 18:30, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Download and testing

A scenery preview is available, as an overlay. In this phase, it still contains parts that are not GPL compatible, hence it is still under its original, NON-GPL license. For more information on this please see the README inside the ZIP file. Note that right now this package includes two other airports, layout only: LIPR, LIDF.

Download here: LIPY_2014-04-29.zip LIPY_2014-06-21.zip

See Howto:Install scenery for installing instructions.

Testing objectives

Please report your experiences/ideas/anything, particularly focusing on the following points:

• Modelers: please open a couple of models and tell me if/how you can fix their axes??

The preferred channel for communication is the forum thread on LIPY.

Project status

• The 850 airport layout has already been sent to Robin from X-Plane. It's not perfect, but is enough.
• Static objects have all been converted and placed.
• LOD adjustment: instead of using an expensive range animation, the "detailed" setting of the LOD dialog is checked and some less important but heavy objects are hidden accordingly:
  • <1500m is low detail
  • 1500m is medium detail (and default FG setting)
  • >1501m is high detail
• The glass made terminal buildings were customized to show the inside.
• Lightmaps and Rembrandt lights make the airport comfortable at night too. Three levels of lights are supported, based on the shader setting:
  • no lights
  • only apron main light poles
  • apron light poles and other apron spotlights
  • streetlights
• Parking positions were fixed (?)
• Custom ground signs were placed

Agenda

This is a to-do list of things that are not yet in the downloadable preview.

• Groundnet, traffic and other XMLs
• substitute non GPLable textures (and fix "thank's")
• rebuild all the texture maps to comply FG scenery db (...)
• Animated PAPI and programmable IBN
• Real taxi and runway lights (that would need an n-th layout version without default lighting...)
• Some better looking oil refinery buildings would really be welcome

Preview gallery

• 

  LIPY landscape with API

• 

  LIPY landscape with Mount San Vicino

• 

  LIPY apron landscape

• 

  LIPY terminals

• 

  LIPY cargo area

• 

  LIPY fire station

• 

  LIPY tower and solar plant

• 

  LIPY aeroclub

• 

  LIPY military tower

• 

  LIPY structures landscape

• 

  LIPY Falconara API refinery

• 

  LIPY at night

• 

  LIPY at night

Models credits

The team to which the creator of the original models belongs is called Phoenix Team and is focused on improving italian military traffic and scenery for MSFS. If you're interested in seeing what a year's worth of volunteer work can lead to, you'd better check out the original scenery if you have Flight Simulator, or just check out some screenshots from a forum thread that followed his development. In fact the original one uses a photoreal ground improved by Gianluca's painstaking hand and includes a very good looking refinery (contribution from a team mate). Other people deserve credits for the scenery, but we'd specially like to remember Bruno, who provided Gianluca with the pictures of buildings and vehicles that, wisely adapted, are texturing the airport objects.

A "thank you" goes also to the creator and maintainer of MCX, Arno (that might want to fix his program support for AC files).