AES Credits: a currency for a product that stopped being built in 2017

simMarket's all-time bestseller list is a strange document. At the top sits FSUIPC4, a utility for a simulator Microsoft stopped selling in 2014. Immediately behind it, at number two across the entire history of the shop, sits a product that is not software at all: ten tokens of prepaid currency called AES Credits, €12.56, published by Aerosoft GmbH.

The difference between the two is that FSUIPC is still being built. AES is not. Airport Enhancement Services reached version 2.45a on 24 January 2017; the installer was patched once more on 14 March 2017 and has not been touched since. The list of supported airports on Aerosoft's own server carries a Last-Modified header of 24 January 2017. Oliver Pabst, who wrote AES single-handedly and answered its support forum for a decade, made his last public post on the Aerosoft forum on 18 August 2017. Nine years ago.

None of which stops you buying credits. Aerosoft's shop sells them today. simMarket sells them today. A customer bought a pack on 16 March 2024, did not receive the serial, posted about it, and an Aerosoft administrator pointed him at his account downloads page. The till works. What you are being sold is a currency that can only be spent inside one program, and that program only runs inside boxed FSX with SP2 or Acceleration, or FS2004 version 9.1. Not FSX: Steam Edition. Not Prepar3D, in any version. Not MSFS.

So the review has to answer a question most reviews never face: what is a currency worth when the shop it spends in has closed its doors but left the lights on? The honest answer turns out to be complicated, because AES still works, it does one thing better than the product that replaced it, and roughly a third of its airport library costs nothing at all.

We read 22 sources for this: both store listings, Aerosoft's own release notes and airport tables, eleven forum threads on the Aerosoft and AVSIM communities dating from 2008 to September 2025, the simFlight review archive, a Steam Community thread and a video. Reddit is blocked to us, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing — for a product whose active discussion mostly predates 2016, that matters less than it usually would.

What you are actually buying

Not the software. The AES Base Pack — the whole program, all vehicles, all animations, the AESHelp and AESConfig tools — is free. What costs money is the right to switch it on at a specific airport.

Product	AES Creditpack — 10 credits
Developer	Oliver Pabst, published by Aerosoft GmbH
Article number	AS10333
Current build	2.45a — announced 24 January 2017, installer re-issued 14 March 2017
Simulators	FSX with SP2 or Acceleration Pack; FS2004 v9.1. Not FSX: Steam Edition, not P3D, not MSFS
Aerosoft price	€12.56 net of VAT (€14.95 including German VAT at 19%)
simMarket price	€12.56 as displayed
Per credit	€1.26 net, roughly €1.50 gross
Airport cost	0 to 5 credits. 193 of 670 entries are free; 248 cost 1; 24 cost 5
Library size	486 unique ICAO codes, 670 airport/scenery entries, frozen at 24 January 2017

The two prices are the same number and are not the same thing. Aerosoft states plainly that "all prices are quoted net of the statutory value-added tax" — €12.56 becomes €14.95 at a German checkout. simMarket's terms say its displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for a logged-out session with no country resolved means zero. So both shops are showing you the net figure and neither is undercutting the other. Anyone telling you one store is cheaper is comparing a pre-tax number with a pre-tax number and calling it a discount.

That price is also remarkable for what it has not done. Reviewing AES for PC Flight in March 2011, Ian Broni recorded the pack at "€14.95 this includes German VAT at 19% or €12.56 without VAT", and noted that Aerosoft and simMarket "both offer the same prices". Fifteen years and five months later, both figures and the parity are unchanged. Whatever else has happened to AES, nobody has raised the rent.

What a credit actually costs you in practice

The credit ladder is the part buyers underestimate. Frankfurt, Heathrow and the other 22 five-credit entries take half a pack each. Unlocking all 24 of them alone is 120 credits — twelve packs, €150.72 net before any bonus. A single airport is cheap; a hub network is not.

Against that, the bonus tiers are real. Buy between three and six packs and you get one extra credit per pack; at six, two per pack; at nine, three; at fifteen, four, a 40% uplift. The ladder as printed overlaps awkwardly at six packs and has read that way, uncorrected, on both store pages for over a decade.

What the community consistently praises

The jetways. This is the one thing AES does that nothing else does, and it is the reason people who own GSX still keep AES installed. Every AES airport was hand-authored: the static jetway is excluded from the scenery and replaced with an animated one aligned to that specific stand. Writing on AVSIM in February 2012, a five-year AES user summarised the gates category as "full marks here, this is AES's party piece" and gave the same verdict on parking guidance, noting that AES reproduces whichever docking system the real airport uses rather than one generic model. In the same thread another user described running both products side by side, disabling AES at airports whose jetways respond to Ctrl-J and disabling GSX everywhere else. That configuration is still the standard advice fourteen years on.

The pushback geometry. AES knows the stand, not just the taxiway graph. Broni's 2011 review describes a straight push at Dublin's A10 lining up with Apron Taxiway 4 "with inch perfect precision", and multiple AVSIM posters make the same point in reverse: GSX, working generically from the AFCAD, pushed people into terminal buildings. AES also offers a pull-forward off stands where a real tug would, and a push-in for reverse parking positions.

The free tier is genuinely generous. 193 of the 670 entries in the 2.45a table cost nothing — Tunis, Algiers, several Captain Seven and 29Palms German fields, a long list of freeware sceneries. You can install AES, spend nothing, and have working animated ground handling at a couple of hundred airports. Very few paid ecosystems give away that much.

Store sentiment is strong, and old. simMarket carries 20 reviews: 16 five-star, two four-star, two three-star, none below. That averages 4.70, not the "5" the listing prints. The most recent of those reviews is dated 1 November 2015, and it is one of the critical ones.

What keeps coming up as a problem

It never left FSX and FS2004. Still open, and now permanent. AES depends on IntelliScene, a third-party module by VistaMare, and that module was only ever built for FS2004 and FSX SP2/Acceleration. On the Steam Community forums in September 2015 a user diagnosed it correctly: AES "will probably never support FSX: Steam, because the guy who made the vistamare module that AES uses stopped develping for FS." A customer opened a thread on Aerosoft's own forum in 2016 asking whether the VistaMare version check could be patched out. It received no reply and was archived.

The P3D question, answered by attrition. On 21 April 2017 Ray Proudfoot, who had spent over £100 on credits for FSX and FS9, asked on the Aerosoft forum whether there was any realistic prospect of AES for P3D. A moderator replied the next day that Pabst was "working on a new version that will cover all platforms" and that this was "not just fixing a problem... but a complete redevelopment". On 13 July 2017 Aerosoft staff drew the line explicitly: "You bought Credits for AES for FSX and FS2004... What you did not buy is any kind of AES for P3D." Nothing has been said since. Status: still open in the sense that nobody ever formally closed it, and closed in every sense that matters.

Version 3.0 has been coming for longer than that. Broni's March 2011 review already noted Pabst posting about V3.0, with repaintable ground fleets and expanded aircraft configuration. Fifteen years later there is no V3.

The cost curve. Still open, by design. This is the oldest complaint in the record and it has never been answered. A German simMarket reviewer wrote on 10 February 2013 that he would happily give two separate ratings — five stars for the technology, far less for the running costs — because a decent hub needs five credits and two of them empty a pack. On AVSIM in February 2012 a user calculated that switching on Miami and Los Angeles cost ten credits, "16 Dollars for two airports", and another put it more bluntly: "why pay hundreds of dollars for AES when $40 to GSX gets me worldwide coverage?" The AVSIM poll on that thread closed at 478 votes: 101 for AES, 377 for GSX.

Allocation is one-way. Broni's review carries the warning in a parenthesis that is easy to miss: "once allocated you cannot undo the credits if you decide you don't want them there". There is community lore on AVSIM that uninstalling a simulator frees its credits for reassignment — one poster said his FS9 credits were released when he moved to FSX — but that is a user report, not documented behaviour, and we could not verify it against any Aerosoft statement. Treat allocation as final.

The library stopped growing. Still open. The airport request thread, opened by Pabst in April 2008, ran to 925 replies and its last post is dated 31 March 2022. Nothing has been added since 2.45a. Requests kept arriving for five years after the last release.

Support is now peer support. Still open. The AES forum's recent history is short and tells its own story. 16 July 2024, an FS2004 user reports an AES detection error: no replies. 17 August 2024, a question about aircraft parameters: no replies. 16 November 2024, a user hits a runtime error 6 overflow and adds that he has raised a ticket but is "not expecting any results to be honest": no replies. The most recent thread, 31 August 2025, was answered on 4 September by mopperle — a volunteer community expert, not Aerosoft, not Pabst.

Delivery has been flaky across a decade. Mitigated. A customer bought credits on 29 July 2016 and got no serial and no confirmation; the developer's answer was that order problems belong at support@aerosoft.com, and the thread was locked. On 16 March 2024 it happened again to another buyer, and an Aerosoft administrator pointed him at his account downloads page. Both were resolved. Both should not have happened.

The pushback animation never got fixed. It moves the aircraft without turning the wheels — one AVSIM reviewer called it "a kind of 'slew' rather than actual push" in 2012, and a simMarket reviewer on 1 November 2015 was still describing the pushback as jerky and unpredictable next to GSX's, with no wheel rotation on Aerosoft's own Airbuses. Nine years of no releases means the answer is no, it will not be fixed.

Performance and stability

On the platform it was built for, AES is stable in the way old software is stable: it stopped changing, so it stopped breaking. The heavy stability thread in the AES forum concerns 32-bit FSX out-of-memory crashes and dates to 2008–2013, and Pabst's own analysis there points at AI aircraft textures rather than AES.

The real risk now is the host operating system, not the sim. simMarket's requirements panel still reads "Windows XP, Vista, 7"; Aerosoft's says Windows 7/8. Nothing in either listing acknowledges Windows 10, let alone 11. The two most recent problems anyone has posted are both environment problems — a Visual Basic runtime error 6 overflow in November 2024, and an August 2025 case where AESConfig refused to accept its own installation path — and neither got a fix, because there is nobody left shipping builds.

Who should buy it

The FS2004 or boxed-FSX flyer with a shelf of Aerosoft German airports. Buy, and buy one pack at a time. This is the profile AES was written for and it is still the best jetway solution that exists for those sceneries. Install the free base pack first, spend nothing, and check how many of your airports are already on the zero-credit list before you pay anything.

The Prepar3D pilot, in any version. Do not buy. This is the profile the record is most emphatic about, and Aerosoft said it in as many words in July 2017: credits bought for AES are credits for FSX and FS2004, and nothing else. If you are on P3D v4 or v5 you want GSX, which supports P3D 3, 4 and 5 and works at every airport rather than 486 of them.

The FSX: Steam Edition owner. Do not buy. It will not run, the reason is a third-party module nobody maintains, and no amount of credits changes that.

The MSFS pilot. Not applicable and never will be. GSX Pro is the only conversation here.

The completist who wants the whole library. Do not buy in bulk. 887 credits' worth of paid entries, at roughly 89 packs, is over €1,100 at list before bonuses — for a library that has not gained an airport since January 2017 and never will.

The returning simmer who bought credits years ago. You do not need to buy anything. Reinstall the free 2.45a base pack over your existing installation; Aerosoft states it leaves credits and activations intact. Your old serials are still valid.

Where it stands today

AES is end-of-life and has been for years without anyone saying so. There is no discontinuation notice, no archive banner, no changed price. Aerosoft's shop page still prints "Current version: 2.45a (2022)", which is generous arithmetic: 2.45a shipped in January 2017 and the only thing that happened in 2022 was that the installer file on the server picked up a new timestamp on 7 January. The listing invites you to click through to "the full list of all airports currently supported by AES". That page has not changed since 24 January 2017.

Be fair about who is left, though, because it is not nobody. People were still asking AES questions in July, August and November 2024 and in August 2025. FS2004 and boxed FSX have a small, stubborn, mostly European userbase built around Aerosoft's German Airports series and Mega Airport range, and for them the calculation has barely moved: a euro and a half buys a hand-made animated jetway at an airport where the alternative is a static one. GSX will not do that at a scenery whose jetways are not Ctrl-J operable, which is exactly the set of sceneries AES was built to cover. The people who run both programs side by side, disabling each at the airports where the other is better, were right in 2012 and are still right.

What has changed is the risk profile of the transaction. In 2012 you were buying into a product with monthly releases and a promised version 3. In 2026 you are buying a token for a program with no maintainer, no compatibility path off a twenty-year-old simulator, no route to recover a credit once you have spent it, and no support beyond one volunteer who answers when he can. That is a legitimate purchase for a narrow group of people who know exactly what they are getting. It should not still be sold at full price with no warning on the label.