Aerosoft Mega Airport Frankfurt: a 2020 airport that keeps catching up with the real one

In September 2024, two people on the same forum thread described the same scenery. One was sitting at gate A30 with FSLTL traffic and GSX running, watching a steady 80–85 frames per second on a 13700K and a 4080 Super. The other was on final for 27L with a 4080, watching four to six. Neither of them was lying.

That argument is the whole story of Aerosoft's Mega Airport Frankfurt, and it took Aerosoft eleven months to end it. The scenery arrived on 5 September 2024 as the most-requested airport in Microsoft Flight Simulator — Aerosoft's own announcement called it "probably the most-requested airport to date" — built over roughly two years by a team of seven under Jo Erlend Sund, the developer behind Brussels, Cologne-Bonn and Oslo-Gardermoen. It landed into a room that had been waiting a very long time, and the first thing a large slice of that room found was that they could not fly into it.

Then, on 22 April 2026, Aerosoft did something almost nobody in this hobby does. Fraport opened Terminal 3 — a €4 billion building that had been under construction since 2015 and slipping to the right for a decade — and on the same day, free to everyone who already owned the scenery, Aerosoft shipped version 1.1.2 with Terminal 3's April 2026 ground layout, the new taxiway "S", animated jetways on the new pier and the Safedock X VDGS units that replaced the old ones. The virtual airport and the real one changed on the same date. That is a remarkable thing for a payware scenery approaching its second birthday.

So this is a review with two clocks running. On one, a product that has been patched eight times in twenty months and is now materially better and more accurate than the thing people bought. On the other, a package that is still, in August 2026, an MSFS 2020 build wearing an MSFS 2024 badge — and whose newest recurring complaint is a 2024 problem the developer has not yet fixed.

We read 29 sources for this: the simMarket and Contrail listings and their rating breakdowns, Aerosoft's own product page, changelog and three news posts, four forum threads across AVSIM and Aerosoft's own support forum, the official MSFS forums, written reviews at Threshold and FSNews, five video reviews and previews, and the listings for every competing EDDF we could find. Reddit, which usually gives the fastest read on sentiment, is not reachable from where we work, so the sentiment picture here is built from store ratings and forum threads rather than from the subreddits.

What you are actually buying

One SKU, one download, both simulators. There is no separate 2024 edition and no upgrade to pay for.

Product	Aerosoft Mega Airport Frankfurt (article AS16415)
Publisher	Aerosoft GmbH
Developer	Jo Erlend Sund with Aerosoft's internal design team — credited on the shop page simply as "Aerosoft Dev Team"
Released	5 September 2024
Current version	1.1.2 (22 April 2026)
Simulators	MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024, one purchase
Aerosoft shop	€20.97 excl. VAT — €24.95 with German VAT
simMarket	€20.97 (PID 19425), the same ex-VAT figure
Contrail	$25.03
flightsim.to store	€25.37
Install	Aerosoft One or the Contrail app. 2.32 GB download, 3.97 GB installed
Not available on	Xbox, or the in-sim Marketplace

A word on that €20.97, because it looks like a sale price and is not one. simMarket's product block for PID 19425 carries a single price element and nothing else — no struck-through pre-sale figure, no percentage badge, and no 30-day-price-low line. The 30-day-low fields on that page belong to the cross-sell tiles further down (Pilot Experience Sim's Biarritz at −40%, Taburet's TGV lines at −30%), not to Frankfurt. Aerosoft's own shop shows the identical €20.97 with the footnote "Price excl. VAT". Add 19% German VAT and you get €24.95, which is exactly the figure FSNews quoted in its September 2024 review. The odd number is a tax artefact, not a discount. If you are waiting for a sale, you have not missed one.

What is in the box is a full-field EDDF: all four runways, including the northwest runway 07L/25R that opened in 2011 and the departure-only Startbahn West, plus the taxiway bridges that carry aircraft over the A3 autobahn to reach it, a custom elevation mesh and runway profiles, custom aerial imagery, a bundled GSX profile, Aerosoft's VDGS module with Safedock Type 1, Type X and now Safedock X, AI parking codes on every stand, and a configurator in Aerosoft One that lets you switch off interiors, static aircraft, passengers, apron vehicles and autobahn traffic individually. That configurator is not a nicety. For a lot of owners it is the difference between owning the scenery and shelving it.

The honest comparison point is that Frankfurt is one of the most contested slots in the sim, and three of the four alternatives cost nothing. MSFS 2024 ships with a handcrafted EDDF (the one AVSIM regulars call the Gaya version), which was also in Premium Deluxe MSFS 2020. Aviotek's freeware EDDF has been on Orbx Direct since 14 June 2024 with interiors, animated jetways and its own GSX profile. virtualFRA's long-running freeware build is on flightsim.to. On the payware side there is a FeelThere EDDF on simMarket that nobody speaks well of. Aerosoft is better than all of them — that is close to unanimous — but it is competing against free, and several people in the AVSIM thread decided free was enough.

What the community consistently praises

The night lighting is the least disputed thing about this scenery. Threshold called it exceptional and specifically credited the research behind the brightness levels, noting directional stop bars and exit lights that respond to CAT I conditions. The reviewer on the official MSFS forums, on 13 September 2024, called it "flawlessly beautiful". FSNews was cooler, calling it "quite adequate", but singled out the one-directional centreline lighting as a genuine navigational aid. Three independent reviewers, three different standards, and none of them had a real complaint. If you fly the European night bank into Frankfurt, this is the part you paid for.

The ground work is the second. Threshold's verdict was blunt: "The product's highlight is definitely the ground texturing, with very accurate markings throughout." Multiple owners mention the rubber deposits laid down to reflect which end of each runway actually gets used. The terraforming is clean, the custom mesh does its job, and the taxiway signage is modelled rather than decalled.

Aerosoft kept updating it, and the updates were real. Eight versions since launch, all free, all through Aerosoft One. Version 1.0.4 (December 2024) reworked LODs and ground texture layering and produced one of the more striking turnarounds in the record — a Contrail reviewer who had been unhappy posted on 11 January 2025 that it was "reassuring that Aerosoft make the effort to improve their airports and after a shaky start with EDDF, this new version looks great". Version 1.1.0, on 15 August 2025, cut VRAM usage by up to 1.6 GB and fixed the Terminal 2 framerate hole, which turned out to be caused by the forest north of the terminal rather than the terminal itself. Version 1.1.1 cleaned up the blurry taxiway textures that 1.1.0 had introduced.

And then Terminal 3. The feature list has said "Up to date airport layout (as of September 2024) incl. Terminal 3 (April 2026)" since launch, which at the time was a promise about a building that did not yet open. It is now a description of the airport as it stands. Version 1.1.2 landed on inauguration day. Very few sceneries of any airport, at any price, have tracked a live construction site this closely.

The VDGS and GSX integration works, and works in both simulators. The bundled GSX profile means the ground services fire correctly out of the box, and Aerosoft's VDGS module drives the docking guidance on the correct stand-by-stand geometry — including, since 1.1.2, the newer Safedock X units the real airport now uses.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Performance, from launch until August 2025. Status: largely fixed, and it took far too long. The Aerosoft support thread "Bad performance at Mega Airport Frankfurt" opened on 6 September 2024, the day after release, and ran to 64 replies and 28,800 views. The specifics are worth reading because they were not the usual complaints from underpowered machines. A 7800X3D and a 4080: frames collapsing on approach to the terminals. A 4080 owner reporting "4-6 FPS on final approach is absurd". A 5950X and a 3080 Ti reporting 7-8 fps on approach to 27L with every configurator option already switched off. Aerosoft's community manager worked the thread hard — removing the default Asobo EDDF, deleting World Update XVIII's German photogrammetry, disabling the collision boxes added in 1.0.1 — and shipped v1.0.1 Rev. B with optimisations within days. But the fix that actually moved the needle for most people was v1.1.0, eleven months later. A customer on 12 October 2024 asked Aerosoft directly whether an update was coming and got silence; another wrote that "everything is silent" from the developer's side. That gap is the single worst thing in this record.

Z-fighting and flickering textures, mostly in MSFS 2024. Status: still open. This is the current complaint, and it is entirely post-1.1.0. Five separate Contrail reviewers raised it between 15 December 2025 and 24 April 2026: "huge Z fighting in textures inside and some in outside"; "a lot of the zfighting affect resulting in many flickering textures" specifically in MSFS 2024; "the z-fighting its shocking"; and a reviewer who rated it 4/5 anyway wrote that "the main thing holding it back is the z-fighting. If the z-fighting were mitigated it would qualify for a higher rating." Version 1.1.2 shipped after four of those five and did not address it.

MSFS 2024 does not reliably know this scenery exists. Status: still open, and not entirely Aerosoft's fault. Installing the Aerosoft EDDF does not always suppress the simulator's own handcrafted Frankfurt. Owners on both the Aerosoft forum and AVSIM ended up with duplicate terminals and duplicate gates and, inevitably, terrible frames — one user's fix, in December 2024, was to rename the Aerosoft folder to microsoft-airport-eddf-frankfurt so the sim would treat it as an override. Another reported a fresh line being appended to content.xml on every single MSFS 2024 launch. Aerosoft's support answer to a related January 2026 bug report was to disable the handcrafted airport — advice that does not help, because the customer had the Standard edition and could not see a handcrafted airport to disable.

The detail is uneven, and the Mega Airport badge invited the comparison. Status: partly addressed, partly by design. The most-liked review on Contrail — 19 likes, posted 13 September 2024, eight days after release — is not angry, which is what makes it land: Frankfurt "didn't have the attention it deserved", the C gates lack the parallax interiors Jo Erlend is known for, and "one or two more months would've been great". Threshold found Terminal 1 clearly prioritised over Terminal 2 and said the ramp clutter "could be a little denser". A one-star Contrail reviewer measured it directly against Oslo-Gardermoen and found the interiors, the building detail and the outskirts all short of it. On AVSIM, one long-standing customer put it most precisely: this is "way below usual Jo Erlend's quality". The counter-argument, made forcefully in the same threads, is that reusing weathering textures across an airport this size is optimisation rather than laziness — and given the performance history, that argument has some force.

Approach lighting and small accuracy misses at launch. Status: mostly fixed. The pre-release complaint that circulated widely — approach lights in the wrong place, at the wrong size, in the wrong colour, plus missing bridges — was partly about a preview build, and the bridges were finished for release. But the PAPI on 07L showing three or four whites on a correct glideslope was reported on 22 September 2024, and the Berlin Airlift Memorial ships as the arch alone, without the DC-3 and DC-6 that stand there in real life. That last one has been fixed by a third party rather than by Aerosoft: a freeware mod, Frankfurt Ultimate EDDF, has been adding the memorial aircraft, spotter crowds and Terminal 3 landside detail since 27 January 2026.

No Xbox, no in-sim Marketplace. Status: unchanged. A console owner asked on Aerosoft's forum whether EDDF would ever come to the Xbox Marketplace and got no answer. Installation is Aerosoft One or Contrail, which means PC only.

Performance and stability

Take the launch numbers first, because they set the terms. FSNews, on a Ryzen 5 3600X and an RTX 2060 Super, measured 23 fps with the Fenix A320 and 26–27 with PMDG aircraft, dropping another five to seven with AI traffic on. Threshold, on a 3700X and a 3080, saw the low twenties on approach but no stutter, and recommended a 5800X3D and a 3060 Ti as a realistic floor for 1080p. The official MSFS forums reviewer, on a 7800X3D and a 7900 XTX, called it smooth with all detail enabled and said disabling interiors, static aircraft and landside animations produced a "big improvement". Same scenery, three very different verdicts, all from people telling the truth about their own machines.

The reason for the spread turned out to be memory rather than geometry. A 2080 owner in September 2024 reported VRAM maxing out at every settings combination he tried, down to Low textures at 1080p with terrain LOD at 25, and suspected a leak; a Contrail reviewer in June 2025 measured "+4GB from any other airport I've seen". Aerosoft's v1.1.0 in August 2025 cut up to 1.6 GB of that, and the sentiment turns almost immediately: a Contrail review two days later reads simply "Excellent scenery and great performance now with version 1.1.0". If you are reading a performance complaint about this airport, check whether it predates 15 August 2025. Most of them do.

There is also a compounding factor that is not Aerosoft's: EDDF sits inside one of the densest photogrammetry regions MSFS ships. World Update XVIII's German 3D cities and the forest north of the field were both implicated, and Aerosoft's own support advice included deleting the photogrammetry entirely. Several owners found that the fix that finally worked was a lower terrain LOD, or AutoFPS, not anything to do with the scenery.

Stability is otherwise unremarkable. No pattern of crashes to desktop in the record beyond one isolated report, no save-breaking bugs, and a support forum that — the eleven-month gap aside — does answer. The one genuinely broken period was the January–February 2025 window when a simMarket buyer reported that flight planning and ATC would not work at the airport after an update; that customer posted twice on 6 February 2025, once at two stars describing the fault and once at five stars saying "Since they correct the problem with the ATC, I'm giving 5 stars." Version 1.0.5's changelog entry — "Fixed missing navdata" — is the fix he was describing.

Who should buy it

The Lufthansa-hub simmer who flies EDDF weekly. Buy it. €24.95 for the best rendition of the airport you spend most of your time at is not a difficult sum, the lighting is worth the money on its own, and you are getting a developer who updated the airport on the day the real one changed. Threshold's framing still holds: solid if you use it often, steep if you drop in occasionally.

The MSFS 2024 user on a mid-range PC. Buy it, but go into the Aerosoft One configurator before your first flight, not after your first disappointment. Turn interiors and static aircraft off, leave the VDGS on, and make sure the simulator's own handcrafted EDDF is actually disabled — check by name, because MSFS 2024 has repeatedly failed to do it for you. Accept that you will see some texture flickering that has not been fixed.

The VR pilot. Do not buy it yet. This is the profile the record argues against most clearly. Frame generation is the thing rescuing most owners' numbers here, and it does not work in VR. One VR flyer in the AVSIM thread reported 60 fps at Aviotek's freeware EDDF with 50 IFR aircraft and nothing like it here. Nothing in the changelog since has specifically addressed that.

The screenshot photographer and terminal walker. Skip it. The complaint that repeats hardest from people who look closely — the C gates without parallax interiors, Terminal 2 finished to a lower standard than Terminal 1, the collision boxes that keep you outside — is aimed squarely at you. Oslo-Gardermoen, from the same developer, is what you actually want.

The occasional visitor who already has a working EDDF. Skip it, or wait. The handcrafted airport in MSFS 2024 and the Aviotek freeware are both genuinely usable, and if Frankfurt is a place you pass through twice a year, the upgrade is real but not worth €24.95.

Where it stands today

Two years on, this is a better product than the one that shipped, and the gap is wide enough that a lot of the criticism still circulating is simply out of date. The performance argument that dominated the first year was settled by version 1.1.0 in August 2025. The navdata failure that made the airport unusable for some owners was fixed in 1.0.5. The missing bridges were finished before release. What is left of the launch-era complaints is a fair one about ambition — this is not Oslo, and the people who expected Oslo were entitled to say so — and a set of small accuracy misses that a freeware mod has been quietly patching since January.

What is not settled is the simulator question, and it is the thing a 2026 buyer should weigh hardest. The badge says MSFS20/24 and the purchase genuinely covers both, but this is a 2020 package running in 2024 through backwards compatibility, not a native 2024 build. Contrail's product metadata says so in one word: MSFS 2024 Native: No — and the same store lists Aerosoft's own Düsseldorf as native, so this is a distinction Aerosoft draws itself. The consequences are visible. Every open complaint in the current record is a 2024 complaint: the z-fighting reported five times between December 2025 and April 2026, the duplicate-airport conflicts, the content.xml growth, the grass across taxiway PAPA1 and the ground vehicles sinking through the autobahn bridges that Christopher Low documented with screenshots on 18 January 2026. None of those exist in MSFS 2020.

The rating spread reflects a room that has mostly made peace with it. Contrail shows 4.07 from 76 votes. simMarket shows four ratings — three fives, one two, and that two is the ATC complaint the same customer withdrew the same day, which means the real spread there is closer to unanimous than the displayed average of 4 suggests. Nobody argues any more that this is a bad Frankfurt. The argument now is whether a scenery this heavy, in a simulator it was not built for, is worth twenty-five euros when three free alternatives are sitting in the same slot. For anyone who flies the hub, it is. For everyone else, the answer has genuinely got closer.