FlyTampa Athens: the frozen build costs more than the one still getting updates

On 2 August 2011 the FlyTampa forum's Athens section opened for business, and within two days it held threads titled "[FS9] Mesh compatability", "[FS9] Extreme shimmering fence textures" and "(FS9) Taxiway K". Fifteen years later, the most recent post in that same section is a man asking why the simMarket copy is on version 1.8 when the Orbx copy is on 2.0. Both threads are about Athens. They are not about the same product.

That is this SKU's whole problem in one sentence. FlyTampa sells five different Athens airports — MSFS, X-Plane, and the FS2004/FSX/Prepar3D build this review is about — from a single product page, and the one listed on simMarket at €24.00 is the oldest of them by a decade. Its content stopped changing on 3 November 2015. Everything shipped since has been a compatibility patch you fetch yourself from a forum thread.

None of which makes it bad. Twenty-three people have rated it on simMarket and all twenty-three gave it five stars, which is not a spread, it is a wall. The 2011 press review called it "as real as it gets". A moderator on AVSIM's Prepar3D forum named it unprompted in October 2021 when someone asked which Greek airports still work in v5. Nobody, anywhere, in fifteen years, has said this scenery is slow.

The awkward part is arithmetic. FlyTampa's own order page sells this build at $24.00 and sells Athens for MSFS 2020 and 2024 at $17.99. simMarket sells this build at €24.00 and the MSFS build at €17.99. The frozen one costs six units more than the one that has had twenty updates since November 2021 and got another this month. There is no cross-grade, no upgrade SKU, nothing. Our Amsterdam review found FlyTampa's legacy pricing was a trap because of the upgrade maths; here there is no upgrade to do the trapping. The base price manages it alone.

This review is built from 38 sources: FlyTampa's own product, order, support and download pages, eighteen threads plus the section index on the developer's forum, two threads on AVSIM, the 2011 simFlight review, both simMarket listings, Contrail, BMT Micro's tax page and two video walkthroughs. Reddit is structurally unavailable in this research environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; on a product this old the forum record more than covers for it.

What you are actually buying

One airport — LGAV, Athens Eleftherios Venizelos — plus a modest ring of surrounding terrain. It is not a city package. Asked directly in September 2021 about odd photoscenery over Athens, george[flytampa] answered plainly that the photoscenery around the city "isn't something we have done". What you get beyond the fence is the rural Mesogeia plain the airport actually sits in, rendered with the same photo textures and hand-placed autogen as the field itself, plus the Attiki Odos motorway and rail corridor, the fuel farm and radar dome on the hill east of runway 21, and the retail sheds — IKEA, Leroy Merlin, the Factory Outlet — between 03L and the cargo apron.

The download is 304 MB. It ships a 14-page PDF covering both FS2004 and FSX, its own mesh and landclass BGLs, the FlyTampa Configurator, and the taxiway and road bridges spanning the sunken motorway that cuts the airport in two — the single most distinctive thing about LGAV, and the reason the scenery needs a specific mesh resolution setting to look right.

Build	Simulators	simMarket	FlyTampa direct	Last content change
FlyTampa-Athens (this one)	FS2004, FSX, P3D v3, v4*, v5*	€24.00	$24.00	v1.6, 3 Nov 2015
FlyTampa-Athens MSFS	MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024	€17.99	$17.99	v2.2, Aug 2026
FlyTampa-Athens XP	X-Plane 11	—	$26.00	—

The asterisks are FlyTampa's own, and they are load-bearing: they link to two forum threads carrying the P3D v4 and v5 patches. A buyer on AVSIM in April 2020 looked at that same asterisk and wrote "Not sure what the * refers to" — which is the entire failure mode.

On price comparability, be careful. simMarket's conditions state that "All prices stated on SIMMARKET include the respectively applicable value added tax", while FlyTampa bills through BMT Micro in USD and adds EU and UK VAT at checkout on top of the listed figure, calculated from the customer's location. The two headline numbers are therefore not the same kind of number. At the 20 August 2026 reference rate of 1.1681, $24.00 is roughly €20.55 net, which makes buying direct the cheaper route for most European buyers once both are taken to the same net basis — but the gap is a few euros, not a category difference, and FlyTampa's site states no tax position anywhere on the page. The comparison that actually matters is the one inside a single store, in a single currency, on a single tax basis: €24.00 against €17.99 at simMarket, $24.00 against $17.99 at FlyTampa. The legacy build is dearer either way.

What is not in the box

No PBR, no dynamic lighting, no terminal interiors, no sloped terrain with 3D drains. FlyTampa's LGAV page lists all of those, because that page describes five products at once; the parenthetical "(X-Plane and MSFS only)" qualifiers are there if you read them. Volumetric grass, animated flags and animated birds are FSX-only, so FS2004 buyers get a visibly thinner airport for the same money. Static aircraft are sparse — a January 2023 buyer's only criticism was that there are "very few static aircraft unlike Kai Tak".

What the community consistently praises

The clutter, still. The 2011 simFlight review singled out the passenger arrival and departure forecourt as "probably the best I have seen up to now at any airport", and that judgement has aged well: the detail sits in discrete placed objects rather than texture trickery, which is exactly the sort of work that survives a decade. Cargo ramp, freight yard, bus stands, the waste-water treatment plant, the underside of the roof over the long stairways to the car park — all modelled, all still holding up at close range.

Performance, unanimously. This is the least disputed finding in the whole record. Gregory, on simMarket in April 2012: "the best frame-friendly airport ever made". ILARIO in June 2016, running P3D v3 with Active Sky, REX and Night Environment: "perfect fps, never OOM". Stephen in May 2016 cited good VAS and FPS; Philipp's German review in February 2017 praised the VAS consumption specifically. The 2011 review found performance "was never an issue" on a GTX 480. Nobody has contradicted this in fifteen years, and for a large international airport in a 32-bit simulator that is an achievement rather than a marketing line.

Night lighting, rebuilt once and rebuilt well. Version 1.5, released 30 July 2015, brought improved gate and taxiway lighting along with animated jetways and 3D characters. The detail people keep returning to is older than that: illuminated taxiway and runway signage throws light onto the ground in front of it, which the 2011 reviewer called out as the kind of small thing that sells the whole scene.

It still runs in FS2004. Christopher, reviewing on simMarket in January 2023, was flying it in FS9 and reported the level of detail, the moving vehicles and the frame rates all fine. That is a genuinely rare property in 2026, and it is the strongest single argument for this SKU continuing to exist.

The developer turns up. george[flytampa] answers threads himself. In July 2014 he compiled a replacement Taxiway_Overlay.bgl for one customer with a ground-flickering problem and attached it to the thread; 1,679 people downloaded it. In December 2015 he posted a ground specular effect lifted from FlyTampa's own Corfu — 1,992 downloads. In February 2016 he posted more P3D-friendly taxiway signs — 2,235 downloads. The support is real. It is also, as the next section explains, the delivery mechanism.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The airport arrives in pieces, and the store does not say so. Still open. To run this scenery correctly on P3D v5 you install v1.6, apply the P3D v4 patch, delete four *papi.bgl files by hand, then apply the P3D v5 patch. That sequence appears nowhere on the simMarket listing, which says only "FS2004 & FSX SP2 DX9 & Prepar3D v3, v4, or v5." A customer on 20 July 2020 skipped the v4 step and lost AI traffic and static aircraft across his entire P3D v5 installation — worldwide, not merely at Athens — and spent a day hunting for a conflicting BGL before working out what he had missed. His closing line is the review in miniature: "it's a great scenery and it's a pity that it's not updated or included in the universal P3Dv5 installer like Corfu for example." Athens remains one of five titles excluded from that installer.

Unpatched, it looks broken. Fixed, once you find the patch. On 26 April 2020 a fresh buyer posted screenshots to AVSIM's Prepar3D forum: blurry road textures, roads that ended in grass, roads sinking into the terrain. One reply assumed that was simply how an old scenery looked. It was not — it was the missing v4 patch, and the poster confirmed later the same day that applying it fixed the road issues. Two other users had to explain the asterisk to him first.

The animated train is gone on P3D v4 and v5. Still open. simMarket's feature list still advertises "Animated Train", and it is one of the scenery's signature touches: LGAV has a real rail station and FlyTampa modelled the service running to it. On P3D v4 and above it does not appear, with or without AES enabled, because the apron and vehicle animations lean on VistaMare's AES-Lite code. That developer is gone. The same AVSIM thread advises disabling AES-Lite outright, because the orphaned code causes random CTDs.

Crashes on approach in P3D v4.5. No answer in thread. Reported on 31 October 2019, again on 9 and 10 December 2019 — "a sudden pause in the sim like it is trying to load something and then goes CTD", consistently around 10nm out on arrival but never when starting a flight at the airport — and again on 18 April 2020. The only developer reply points at the v4 patch. One user's sardonic "The support here is exquisite!" on 5 April 2020 is the nearest thing to a resolution the thread contains. Given the AES-Lite advice above, the two problems are probably one problem, but nobody ever confirmed it publicly.

The fixes were never consolidated. Still open, ten years on. In May 2016 a customer asked for the obvious thing: one up-to-date installer that finds P3D v3 by itself and includes the new taxi signs and the specular effect. He had to bump his own thread after a fortnight. The answer, when it came, was that the installer reads a registry key and if that key is missing you point it manually. The consolidated installer never appeared. It still has not.

The airport it depicts no longer exists in that form. Structural. LGAV opened on 28 March 2001 and was handling around 15 million passengers when FlyTampa built this; it handled 33.9 million in 2025. The main terminal's south wings were physically extended under a €14.95 million contract tendered in March 2018, adding 18 check-in desks, with the building work running to mid-2019 and the retail and lounge additions to mid-2020 — all of it after this scenery's content froze. On 2 August 2026 a customer listed the works now under way: a seven-storey car park going up where the short-term lot was, and a completed 300,000 square metre excavation in the north-west for 32 new remote stands. George's reply was four words long: "It'll be done when completed." He was answering about the MSFS build.

Performance and stability

Performance is this scenery's headline virtue and nothing in the record disputes it. The complaints are all compatibility complaints, and they cluster hard around the 64-bit Prepar3D generation the product was never rebuilt for.

The recurring ones, with status: ground texture flickering in FSX alongside FTX Global, Vector and openLC (raised July 2014, fixed for the reporter by a hand-compiled BGL two days later, but the underlying layering conflict recurs in later threads — mitigated); the Athens_LC landclass folder fighting Orbx openLC Europe in P3D v5, which one user solved in September 2021 by disabling that folder entirely, the same workaround FlyTampa's Toronto needs (workaround, not fix); AI traffic and static aircraft vanishing after an out-of-order patch install (user error, but user error the store's instructions invite); and random CTDs traced by community consensus to orphaned AES-Lite code (mitigated by switching it off in the Configurator, at the cost of the apron animations).

On Prepar3D v6, be precise, because we have previously printed the flat claim that no FlyTampa title supports it and that is not quite what the record says. FlyTampa's catalogue lists no v6 anywhere, for any product, and no v6 patch exists for Athens — that much holds. But on 20 December 2023 george[flytampa] told a customer that Sydney "should be fine in V6", on 29 December he explained that the universal installer lets you browse to the v6 folder, and on 9 February 2024 a customer reported flying into St Maarten in v6 successfully. That informal route is real, and it is closed to Athens, because Athens is one of the titles the universal installer does not cover. For this product, v5 is the practical ceiling.

Who should buy it

The FS2004 or FSX flyer who wants Athens. Buy it. There is no serious payware alternative for those simulators — the only other LGAV options are a freeware v2.2 and a Spata photoreal area package in the AVSIM library — and on the sims it was actually built for, this thing is still excellent. You also get the volumetric grass, the birds, the flags and the working train that the Prepar3D crowd does not.

The P3D v3 flyer. Buy it. v1.6 was built for your simulator, the installer supports it directly, and none of the patch chain applies to you.

The P3D v4 or v5 flyer who reads instructions and rather enjoys the fiddling. Buy it, but budget an evening. Register on the FlyTampa forum first, read both compatibility threads before you install anything, and follow the sequence exactly. What you get at the end is the best Athens available for your simulator, and it will run beautifully.

The P3D v6 flyer. Do not buy it. There is no supported route in, no patch, and no universal installer coverage. Wait, or move sims.

Anyone who owns MSFS 2020 or 2024. Do not buy this one. Buy the MSFS build instead — it is €6.01 cheaper on the same store, it has PBR, dynamic lighting, terminal interiors, sloped terrain and the 2021-22 airport layout, and it reached version 2.2 this month with a developer actively answering bug threads about it. There is no cross-grade in either direction, so owning this buys you nothing over there, and owning that makes this pointless.

The collector buying it because it is ranked all-time #40 on simMarket. Do not read the rank as a verdict on the current product. That number is fifteen years of cumulative sales for an airport that had no competition and was, for most of those years, genuinely state of the art. It is a historical fact, not a purchase recommendation. For what it is worth, the rank is clean: this title has never been given away free, and FlyTampa's only Athens-adjacent giveaway was an FSElite raffle over Christmas 2021 for a single winner's choice of product.

Where it stands today

FlyTampa's own support page defines its terminology: "We are therefore using the term 'Legacy Product' to label Addons which we feel are not up to our current design standards anymore." Seven titles carry that label on the order page, priced between $12 and $18. Athens does not carry it, and sits at $24.00 among the current releases. The same distinction holds structurally on the developer's forum, where there is a category called "Legacy & Discontinued Products" holding Boston V.3, Seattle and San Francisco — and FlyTampa-Athens is not in it.

By FlyTampa's own definition, then, this is a current product meeting current design standards. It is not, and the developer knows it is not, because he built the replacement and priced it lower. What Athens actually is, is the last FlyTampa airport of the FSX era that nobody has got round to reclassifying: a genuinely fine 2011 scenery still wearing a 2011 price tag in 2026, sold beside a 2026 rebuild of the same airport that costs less.

Scored as what it is, it lands at 3.6. The airport alone would score higher — the ground detail, the performance and the night lighting are all still worth four and change, and twenty-three perfect ratings are not a fluke. What pulls it down is everything around the airport: the assembly required on the only Prepar3D versions most people still run, the advertised train that is not there on those versions, the crash reports nobody closed out, and a price that makes no sense next to the developer's own shelf.

If you fly FS2004, FSX or P3D v3, none of that reaches you and you should buy it today. If you fly anything newer, FlyTampa has already built you a better Athens and is charging you less for it.