Cartayna Files GSX L2 Configurations: the five-star reviews were written when it was free

Seven people have reviewed this product on simMarket. Six gave it five stars, one gave it four, and the store rounds that up to a flat 5. Read the reviews themselves and something odd happens. "And for 0€ ist is affordable for everyone," writes Philipp on 7 June 2020. "Thanks for your unbelievable price," writes Adami two days later. "Words cannot express my gratitude for your making these files available to us for free," writes Ya'en in January 2022. Every voice on that page is thanking Javier Iturralde Lind for giving his work away.

The same page now asks €9.99.

That is not a scandal — the man put thousands of hours into this and is entitled to be paid for them, and one AVSIM moderator says exactly that. But it does mean the star rating sitting at the top of the listing was earned by a different transaction from the one a buyer makes today, and it means the single question this review has to answer is the one none of those seven reviewers ever had to ask: what does €9.99 buy that free profiles do not?

What is in the box is 108 GSX Level 2 configuration files — .ini profiles that tell FSDreamTeam's GSX where the jetways, stands, service vehicles and pushback routes belong at a specific payware airport, from a specific developer. They are not scenery and they are not a simulator add-on in their own right. Without GSX they do nothing at all, and GSX is the expensive part.

We read the store listing and its full review history, four AVSIM threads spanning September 2019 to November 2025, the official Microsoft Flight Simulator forums, FSDreamTeam's own product and checkout pages, the developer's YouTube channel, and the free-profile libraries run by scenery developers and by the community — nineteen sources in all. Reddit is blocked in this environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; for a niche configuration pack for a legacy simulator that matters less than it usually would, because the argument here happens on forums, not on Reddit.

What you are actually buying

One 807.87MB download, listed on simMarket as version 1.0, available since 7 June 2020, product ID 13397. There is no installer worth the name — you unpack, you read a spreadsheet, you copy .ini files into GSX's folder and, at most airports, you disable the scenery's own SODE jetways first.

Item	Price	Where
Cartayna Files GSX L2 Configurations P3D	€9.99	simMarket only
GSX (FSX/P3D) base — required	$23.99	FSDreamTeam / FastSpring
GSX Level 2 expansion — required	$19.99	FSDreamTeam / FastSpring
GSX + GSX Level 2 bundle for newcomers	$33.99	FSDreamTeam / FastSpring

Read that table before the rest of the review. A simmer who owns neither piece of GSX is looking at roughly $45 to make these €9.99 files do anything, and the GSX Level 2 expansion is no longer sold through simMarket at all — that listing is dead and redirects to a 404, so it has to come from FSDreamTeam's own FastSpring store. The €9.99 figure was checked on 20 August 2026 in an unresolved session, which under simMarket's own terms means 0% VAT applied; a logged-in EU buyer will see more. The pack is sold nowhere else. Orbx Direct carries nine Cartayna products, but every one of them is for Microsoft Flight Simulator; the P3D pack is not among them.

Which airports, and whose

This is the part that decides whether the pack is worth anything to you personally, and it is unusually easy to check because the full list is printed on the store page. 108 entries covering just over 100 distinct ICAO codes, each tied by name to one developer's rendition: EGLL for SimWings/Aerosoft, EHAM for FlyTampa, EDDM for Taxi2Gate, KDEN and KSFO for Flightbeam, KMIA for LatinVFR, seventeen Drzewiecki Design fields, six from UK2000. Where two developers made the same airport, or one developer shipped a v2, you get both — EDDL appears twice for JustSim v1 and v2, EGKK twice for UK2000 and JennaSoft, LEMD twice for SimWings and LatinVFR, EPKK twice for Drzewiecki's V2 and V3.

The corollary is blunt. A profile written for FlyTampa's Amsterdam is worthless over anyone else's Amsterdam, and one entry — FlyTampa Copenhagen — carries the note "not for v2" right there in the list. Count how many of the 108 you actually own before you spend anything. If it is two or three, this is not a purchase, it is a lottery ticket.

What it is not

It is not for Microsoft Flight Simulator. GSX Pro is a separate product and the Cartayna MSFS profiles are seven separate packs at €8.26 each. simMarket badges this one P3D5, though the underlying GSX Level 2 expansion supports FSX, FSX:Steam Edition and Prepar3D from 3.4 through 6.x, and the airport list is full of FSX-era sceneries. The bundled logo library — over 400 airline logos, which is genuinely a nice thing to have — works only in P3D v4.5. The listing has said "Hopefully, the new P3DV5 GSX Level2 will bring logos in the future" since 2020. It did not, and the author stopped.

What the community consistently praises

The pushbacks. This is the one thing everybody agrees on, across six years and every source that has actually used the files. Cartayna's configurations define pushback routes stand by stand so that the manoeuvre matches a real controller's instruction to face a given direction, rather than GSX's default guess. "Javier did an amazing work making those configurations 'as real as it gets', especially pushback-wise," wrote Stanislaw on the store page on 10 June 2020, and nothing in the record since contradicts him. It is the feature the developer chose to build the product around and it is the feature that lands.

The jetways are the second thing. GSX Level 2 replaces default jetways with its own animated models, and Cartayna's profiles pick a specific type per stand — metal, glass, and the glass ones let you watch passengers walk through. Ray Proudfoot, an AVSIM moderator running P3D v5.3 HF2, put it plainly on 18 November 2025: he considers Cartayna's jetways superior to the standard SODE ones, "so many different types including glass ones allowing the user to see pax boarding." That is a current statement from a heavy user, five years after the last update, and it is the strongest single endorsement in the record.

Individual airports draw specific praise. Ian Harrison, who was otherwise unimpressed, said the actual jetways and ground markings at FSDreamTeam's Vancouver looked extremely good. micstatic on AVSIM used the Newark, Washington National and St. Maarten profiles and called them nice enough to keep. Dirk, on the store page in August 2020, used it at FlyTampa Amsterdam and gave it four stars with one caveat about jetway length.

And the coverage is real. Whatever else is true, 108 hand-built configurations for legacy payware is a body of work nobody else assembled for FSX and P3D, and one AVSIM regular in November 2025 still described Cartayna as one of the largest resources for GSX .ini files that exists.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The instructions. Still open, and now permanently so. This is the single most repeated complaint and it started on day three. "Firstly, the author is not a native English speaker. The instructions are far from clear in many instances," wrote Ian Harrison on AVSIM on 10 June 2020, describing a Vancouver install where the promised gate relabelling never happened and a Frankfurt install where GSX then reported no jetway where jetways plainly existed. "A lot of hard work from the author but spoiled by poor instructions." A month and a half later, on 28 July, he reported he had removed them entirely: "I saw no discernable difference." The product has had no support since 2023 and no updates, so whatever the instructions say now is what they will always say.

Duplicate and missing jetways. Still open. Because the profiles replace a scenery's own SODE jetways rather than working alongside them, an incomplete install leaves two sets of jetways at the same stand, or none. A. Ortega spent June and July 2020 on AVSIM trying to clear duplicate jetways at MK Studios Keflavik and UK2000 Manchester, following the developer's instructions, with help from two other users and a reply from Javier himself, and ended up uninstalling. micstatic reported Cancún showing only the terminal half of the jetway on 31 July 2020. And in November 2025 a buyer called marsha bought the pack specifically to fix a jetway problem at Aerosoft Heathrow and found the whole of Terminal 4 had no jetways at all.

The design choice itself is disputed. Several credible voices think replacing a scenery developer's custom SODE jetways with generic GSX ones is the wrong trade. "Most developers create custom jetway models for their airport and they have the same functionality as GSX L2. Thus, it is not necessary to change them," wrote Christoph on AVSIM on 14 June 2020. An independent config author making the same argument in September 2019 was blunter: "I don't agree with just replacing native sode jetways. It's unrealistic." Javier answered the criticism directly on 28 June 2020 — he added jetways because users asked for them, default configurations are included for people who would rather keep the scenery's own, and having the choice cannot be a problem. That is a fair answer, and the review is closer than the complaint count suggests. But it is a taste question the buyer should settle before paying, not after.

The bundled Frankfurt AFCAD. Still open. The pack ships a revised airport file for EDDF. A P3D v5 user reported on 10 June 2020 that with it installed, AI aircraft sink into the elevated connecting taxiways in P3D v5. It was a fair complaint about a free package in 2020; it is a defect in a paid one in 2026, and there is nobody left to fix it.

No support, no updates, and the seller says so. The listing's closing paragraph is admirably honest: since 2023 Cartayna closed the P3D project to concentrate on MSFS 2020, "No updates are to be expected and this product has no support." The corroboration is everywhere. The last Cartayna release on simMarket of any kind is MSFS Pack 7 on 30 December 2023. The developer's YouTube channel — 46 videos, 528 subscribers — has posted nothing in three years. The listed support channel is a Facebook page. Version 1.0, dated 7 June 2020, is the only version there has ever been.

Performance and stability

Configuration files cost nothing in frames. There is no executable here, no background process, no shader — GSX reads a text file at load and positions objects accordingly, and nobody in six years of forum threads has reported a performance cost from these profiles. The stability questions are all installation-shaped rather than runtime-shaped: the duplicate-jetway state, the SODE conflict, the Frankfurt AFCAD's effect on AI ground traffic.

One genuinely good piece of news for anyone worried the files have rotted. GSX's profile format has not moved under them. Ray Proudfoot was running Cartayna's Heathrow jetways successfully in P3D v5.3 HF2 in November 2025, and the November 2025 troubleshooting thread ends with the profiles working as designed once the SODE side was sorted out. The pack is stale, not broken. What has moved on is everything around it: the store badges it P3D5, several of the target sceneries have had v2 releases the profiles do not know about, and the P3D v6 case is untested in public.

Who should buy it

The P3D holdout with a deep legacy payware collection. Buy it. If you can count fifteen or twenty of the 108 entries in your scenery folder — and if you are the kind of simmer still flying P3D v5 in 2026, you probably can — €9.99 works out at pennies per airport for hand-tuned pushbacks you would otherwise spend an evening apiece building. Budget an hour of fiddling per airport for the install and go in knowing there is no one to ask.

Anyone who downloaded the free zip between 2019 and 2022. Do not buy it. You already own the finished product. There has been exactly one version and it has not changed since June 2020. Check your archives before you check out.

The simmer with two or three matching airports. Do not buy it. Look first at what your scenery developer gives away — Aerosoft publish free SODE jetway packs for their SimWings airports, FSDG publish free GSX profiles, and plenty of payware airports have shipped native GSX support since 2020 precisely because this gap existed. Then watch the developer's own tutorial series on making a profile, which is still on YouTube for free, and build the two you need.

Anybody who needs to be able to ask a question. Do not buy it. The seller states there is no support. The only listed channel is a Facebook page.

MSFS 2020 and 2024 users. This is not your product and it will not work. The MSFS profiles are seven separate Cartayna packs at €8.26 each, and even those have had nothing new since December 2023.

Where it stands today

The uncomfortable fact about this pack is that its reputation and its price were never simultaneously true. Every warm word in the public record — the seven store reviews, the AVSIM regulars defending the author against criticism, the argument that a man who worked for free owes you nothing — was written about a free download. The one substantial, dated criticism written by somebody who had paid money came in January 2023, against Cartayna's MSFS sibling product, and it went straight at the same point: "If you ask someone to pay for a profile that others make for free, I expect that profile to be as good, or better, than anything anyone has made for free." Five months later another paying customer on the same page called it good, cheap, often updated and much better than the free stuff. Both of them are describing the same files. Which of them is right depends entirely on which airports you own.

The free ecosystem has also grown up around the pack while the pack stood still. Microsoft's own community manager, answering a question about GSX profiles on the official forums on 10 February 2025, described the state of the art in one sentence: these profiles "are normally completely free," and third-party developers increasingly ship one with the scenery. That is now the baseline. Cartayna's answer to it is breadth — nobody else built 108 of these for legacy sims — and specificity, because a profile built against FlyTampa's Athens is worth more than a generic one. Neither of those advantages is going to grow.

So it is a good piece of work, sold honestly, at a price that is fair for what it contains and awkward against its own history. If the list matches your hangar, buy it and enjoy pushbacks that finally match what the controller told you to do. If it does not, the free profiles will serve you better than a bargain you cannot use.