Many people fly in and out of Glacier Park International Airport in Montana. Servicing various regional carriers and private jets alike, and being home to Glacier National Park attracts tourists year-round. The developers over at HSD Development took the liberty of developing a visual rendition of KGPI for X-Plane 11.

KGPI was released by HSD Development on May 14th on the Forums and while the project was left, the developers have gone on to release more projects such as KBIS, KCMH, and KTEX. Along with these projects, they have released their own Enhanced Skyscapes preset.

History:

Being built in 1942 and named the Flathead County Airport, the airport did not see much foot traffic until 1950, when Northwest Airlines began air services. After a short two decades, the airport was designated as an international airport, with passenger traffic increasing with carriers such as Delta, Western Air, and Frontier. The airport began upgrades in 1981 and has not received a notable upgrade since then.

Showcase:

HSD has been gracious enough to include many features, such as SAM support to add moving jetways. With my GTX 970, there were little frame drops when looking at the models of the buildings and textures. Night lighting also did not affect my frames in the slightest (which for private jet ops in and out, I can say it is very nice to not drop 15 frames when on approach). Also to note that the developer has stated that there are “STUDY LEVEL PARKING LOTS” which I thought was a nice touch of humor to the feature list.

Continuing, we branch out to the detail of the terrain imagery. The provided 15 square miles of custom imagery provides an even more immersive experience flying in. A feature that the developers do provide is the option to have no 3D grass or to have 3D grass. This is a great way for developers to reach all ends of the market when it comes to users with high and low-end graphics cards.

Final Remarks:

This rendition of KGPI is great for anyone looking to do small airliner ops or private jet services. The amount of detail for such a small airport, in my opinion, competes with freeware sceneries from developers like SFD. Hands down a good scenery to have in your library.