Flight Simulator 5.1 Gold Edition feat. "Chicago & The Midwest" Addon

A short IFR roundtrip over Illinois in my WIP "Gold Edition" of Flight Simulator 5.1.
This video covers the first flight in a series of demo videos of an upcoming addon for FS5.1, encompassing the area that Microsoft forgot. Namely Chicago, the Great Lakes area and the Midwest. Sure Chicago and some surrounding area was always a staple of FS, but it never got the in-depth treatment that MS gave other areas via addons. This scenery will cover roughly 10 US states, with all urban and geographic features, roads, rivers, lakes, cities, towns, buildings mountains, forests, farmland, antennas / obstacles, and all airports (many photoreal), runways and navigation data!
The Gold Edition itself also features many other upgrades to the sim, in the form of new hand drawn control panels based on the real deal, new panel functionality, new sounds, innovative scenery techniques (like non-disappearing roads, buildings with full draw distance and non-scaling textures, as well as non-flickering night lighting), new photoreal and optimized textures, splash screen, unique aircraft textures, and the possibility of current weather import via METAR.
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In this clip, we take off in our well used Piper Seneca II from Champaign, IL, then fly southwards to Mattoon at roughly 3000ft. Over Mattoon we turn heading northwest, tuning in Decatur VORTAC at 117.20. We pass over Lake Shelbyville taking in the view of the small towns along the way, like Sullivan and Bethany. We now climb to 5000ft. At Decatur we do a pass by the airport, to take in the view, while also getting our ATIS. Next stop is Springfield (Springfield? Shelbyville? Hmmm.. sounds familiar). We tune in the VORTAC at 112.70 and arrive there quite fast. At 00h 47m we seem to experience some transmission issues, I apologize for that. Another ATIS is given and today the weather is luckily fair and stable.
We now head north towards Peoria, tuning in the VORTAC at 115.20. Farmland here is plentiful, but soon we meet the Illinois river, with Mud Lake, Spring Lake and Big Lake on our left. By now the Piper is down to 3/4 fuel, as we fly quite fast. At the river we bank right heading towards Pekin. In the distance to the north we can see Peoria and the hills beyond, like the Harvard Hills, Germantown Hills, and Oak Ridge. At Peoria we buzz the airport and downtown before heading upriver.
It is time to pop above the clouds and we take the trusty Seneca up to about 14 000 ft. We have tuned into the Joliet VORTAC while also cross-referencing with ADF. It will soon be sunset and we have only half a tank of gas, so our hopes of reaching Chicago in daylight are gone. We decide to leave that for another day. After reaching Joliet, and a brief stint north of the Illinois river we head southwest, towards the Kankakee VORTAC. The sunset view is nice above the clouds, and it is fun to take in the scenery from above the clouds. Nevertheless, we make our descent down to 3200ft. That will make it easier to use the highways for navigation in addition to our instruments. We tune into the VORTAC at Roberts, and fly a steady course of 180 degrees, still cross referencing with local NDBs.
Some minutes past the 2 hour mark we can see the lights of Bloomington, and we will soon come upon the I57 from Kankakee to Champaign! We head over there and check out the highway traffic. We can now see the lights of Champaign, while also heading for the VORTAC there. There are some high antennas around the city, so we need to watch out for those, but they are easy to see. We buzz the city checking out the night lights and now the airport has come into view. Then we fly south towards Tolono and tune in the NDB at Veals, this will set us up for a good approach at runway 32R. After lining up the approach we descent smoothly down and make a nice landing at Champaign, 2 hours and 30 minutes after we took off.
A fine evening flight indeed.

[@jeluci486]

Very cool!!

[@robertsartino7664]

Awesome

[@Daimo83]

Hard to believe somebody is still developing mods for fs5! Well done!

[@pixelwings821]

Hey thanks a lot! It is in fact a very moddable version, so it is fun to do :)