Chicago Airports XP: still version 1.0 from 2019, and X-Plane 12 will cost you again

On 3 May 2020, simMarket gave Chicago Airports XP away. Free, for about forty-eight hours. One of the four customer ratings still sitting on the product page is from a man who took the deal — "I got this in the sale for free", he wrote, and then said my god about it. The X-Plane.Org thread where simmers passed the news around carries the other half of the same afternoon: frames from 50-plus down to under 20, "often followed by a crash on VRAM".

Both men are describing the same file. They are still describing the same file, because Drzewiecki Design has not touched it since. The X-Plane.Org Store lists the current version as 1.0, 20 December 2019, and the version history underneath it has exactly one line: Initial Release. There is no 1.1. There has never been a 1.1.

What you get for that is three Chicago airports — O'Hare, Midway and Chicago Executive — for €38.00 at simMarket, where the package is still the 21st best-selling product of all time. It is a genuinely good 2019 scenery. The problem is that it is 2026, X-Plane 12 has been the current simulator since December 2022, and this is an X-Plane 11 product whose developer has said in public that it will not be retrofitted. Drzewiecki is not idle — it has shipped KDCA Washington in March 2024, KMDW Chicago Midway in March 2025 and KEWR Newark in early 2026, all as new, standalone, separately-priced X-Plane 12 sceneries. Midway is the point to hold on to. One third of this bundle has already been sold to you a second time.

So the review turns on a question that has nothing to do with how good the modelling is, and the modelling is good. It turns on which simulator you are running, and on which of the three airports you would actually fly to.

We read 20 public sources for this: both store listings and a third, four X-Plane.Org Forum threads spanning September 2022 to May 2026, one full written review, the X-Plane Scenery Gateway's own change log for KORD, X-PlaneReviews on the airport's current X-Plane 12 rival, two video walkarounds, and the release coverage. Reddit is blocked to us, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; on this product it would not have added much, because the discussion barely exists anywhere. AVSIM's site search returns zero results for "Chicago Airports XP". X-PlaneReviews never reviewed it. simMarket has four ratings in six and a half years.

What you are actually buying

Three airports, and only three. This matters because Drzewiecki's Chicago name is attached to several different products and they are easy to confuse.

	Chicago Airports XP	Chicago City XP	KMDW Chicago Midway XP12
Simulator	X-Plane 11	X-Plane 11	X-Plane 12
Contents	KORD, KMDW, KPWK	The city, landmarks, three heliports, hospital pads	KMDW only
simMarket	€38.00	€20.00	—
X-Plane.Org Store	$45.00	$26.00	$20.00
Just Flight	US$44.99	—	US$19.99
Current version	1.0, 20 Dec 2019	—	1.0, 7 Mar 2025

The heliports people associate with Drzewiecki's Chicago are not in this package. The Chicago Vertiport, the Police Marine pad, the Chicago Heli-Experience site and the hospital pads all live in Chicago City XP, the separate €20.00 cityscape. If you are buying for rotary flying, you want the other product.

Download is 1.4 GB. The store asks for 4 GB VRAM minimum and 8 GB or more recommended, which for a 2019 scenery is a warning in itself. Animated jetways, VDGS and marshallers require the third-party SAM plugin, which is not bundled — the HeliSimmer reviewer found being prompted to go and fetch it mid-install annoying in January 2020, and six years later that dependency sits inside a product that will never be patched to move off it.

On the price

simMarket's €38.00 is not straightforwardly cheaper or dearer than the $45.00 dollar stores. simMarket's own terms, clause 1.5, read: "All prices stated on SIMMARKET include the respectively applicable value added tax." On an unresolved session that applicable rate is zero, so €38.00 is the pre-VAT figure; simMarket's own conversion widget puts it at $44.10. Add EU VAT at checkout and a European buyer pays more than the Just Flight sticker, not less. Treat all three as the same price and buy wherever your account already is.

On the ratings

simMarket prints a headline 5 over four reviews. The spread underneath is three five-star and one three-star, which averages 4.50. Four ratings is not a sample, and at least one of them was written by somebody who paid nothing.

What the community consistently praises

The modelling. This is not in dispute anywhere in the record, and it is the reason the product sold. Joe Hudson's January 2020 review at HeliSimmer — a real-world AH-64 instructor pilot, reviewing the city and airports together — gave the pair 9.2/10 and singled out the custom buildings, the hangars and the off-field surroundings. His observation that Drzewiecki "does their best to set a scene" for each FBO is the sharpest thing anyone has written about the package: Signature Aviation appears at all three fields, and the business jets, vehicles and people parked outside the Midway location are the kind of arrangement somebody looked at a photograph to build.

Night lighting is the second constant. Hudson called the ramp lighting really good with HDR enabled and had no complaint about any of the three airports after dark; the developer's own screenshots lean on dusk for a reason. It is the single area where the 2019 build still stands up against sceneries five years younger.

Interiors are the third. All terminal buildings, all towers and some hangars are modelled inside, at all three fields, and nobody in six years has complained that they are fake or empty.

And a point that deserves credit rather than the shrug it usually gets: at release the KORD layout was built to the ORD21 target configuration, including runway 9C/27C — which did not open in the real world until November 2020, eleven months after this scenery shipped. Drzewiecki modelled a runway that did not yet exist and got it right. That was genuinely forward-looking work.

What keeps coming up as a problem

It has never been updated. Status: still open, permanently. Version 1.0 of 20 December 2019 is the only version there has ever been. Set against a developer who has shipped three new X-Plane 12 airports since March 2024, this is a decision rather than an oversight. Stephen Dutton at X-PlaneReviews put it plainly in March 2025: a fair few of the older Drzewiecki X-Plane sceneries are "in wanting of attention".

There is no X-Plane 12 version and there will not be one. Status: still open. The developer's position, widely quoted since it appeared on their own forum in September 2022, is that they will not adapt X-Plane 11 sceneries to version 12 and would only ever build fully standalone XP12 products. Their subsequent behaviour matches exactly: KDCA Washington (March 2024), KMDW Chicago Midway (7 March 2025, $20.00) and KEWR Newark (early 2026, $24.00), each new-built, each full price. There is no O'Hare among them. We could not read the original forum post ourselves — Drzewiecki's site is behind a bot check that refuses automated readers — so we are relying on how it was reported and on six years of consistent conduct.

Running it in X-Plane 12 anyway is a coin toss. Status: still open. The long X-Plane.Org thread on Drzewiecki sceneries in XP12 runs from 15 September 2022 to 26 May 2026 and never resolves, because the answers genuinely differ. Some report New York, Washington and Seattle copying over and looking fine — one user in August 2025 said the packages work with only slightly over-bright stand lighting. Others report the opposite in the same thread: "massive stutters and improperly placed objects (floating or sunken)" in April 2023, apt.dat loading errors in September 2025, and in May 2026 a Kraków scenery that simply refuses to let the simulator start. A separate September 2022 thread titled Caveat emptor logged pink approach lights and trees vanishing on pan. None of that was tested on Chicago specifically. That is the point: nobody is testing it, and nobody is fixing it.

O'Hare's ground layout has gone stale. Status: still open. The Scenery Gateway's change log for KORD is a public record of everything that has changed at the real airport since, and every entry after December 2019 is content this file cannot contain: runway 9R/27L extended to 11,260 ft and the Terminal 5 extension added (November 2022), Terminal 3's Concourse L expanded for three new gates (June 2024). In December 2024 an X-Plane.Org user flying VATSIM listed exactly what was missing — taxiway TT south of the 27L approach end, the taxiway complex west of the United satellite concourse — and named "both the Nimbus and simMarket payware sceneries" as failing the same test. The free Gateway KORD was rebuilt again on 11 and 12 July 2026, the contributor noting they had "corrected ALL the taxiways that were wrong (there were a ton)". The default airport in X-Plane 12 is now more current than the €38 payware.

KPWK is still labelled Palwaukee. Minor, and Hudson flagged it in January 2020: the identifier is right, the name in the simulator is the one the field dropped years ago.

It fights with its neighbours. Status: mitigated, by hand. ORBX's Meigs Field wipes out the Drzewiecki airports for at least one user; Ortho4XP tiles for the Chicago area conflict with the package's own imagery. Both are fixable by editing scenery_packs.ini, and Hudson worked out a compromise with Meigs, but you lose the Downtown heliport doing it.

Performance and stability

The marketing sentence is "Great performance has been coupled with visual excellence". The record does not support it, and the disagreement about it is old and consistent.

Hudson, on an i7-4790K with an RTX 2080, held 50–60 fps over downtown and 36–40 in VR, and called that fine — but listed "significant frame rate impact expected on lower end computers" as his first negative. On 3 May 2020, the day of the giveaway, a user reported the opposite on the same file: 50-plus fps down to under 20, with VRAM crashes on top, and wondered aloud whether SAM's lack of Vulkan readiness was the cause. A week earlier a small channel had posted a walkaround captioned, in effect, that performance was horrible and he was recording just how bad. The pattern in the Drzewiecki forum discussion is the same and more specific: O'Hare's apron in daylight is manageable, O'Hare's apron under its own lighting is not, and reports of single-digit-to-mid-teens frame rates around the main terminal after dark recur.

The mechanism is not mysterious. O'Hare is the heaviest ramp anyone models in any simulator, the lighting that everybody praises is the thing that costs, and switching HDR off to claw the frames back in X-Plane 11 also switches off cockpit flood lighting — so the night scenery you paid for is not usable without the setting that makes it slow. There is no dispute here between sources so much as a dispute between two halves of the same design.

For calibration: X-PlaneReviews measured Nimbus's ground-up X-Plane 12 KORD v4 in January 2026 at low-30s fps with the texture slider backed off a notch, on a machine where heavy sceneries normally sit in the low 40s, and recommended a 12 GB graphics card. Big O'Hare costs money in every simulator. This one costs it in a version of X-Plane that no longer receives engine work.

Who should buy it

If you are on X-Plane 12 — do not buy this. That is not a hedge and it is not about risk tolerance. The store lists X-Plane 11 as the requirement, the developer has said it will not adapt XP11 work to XP12, and the reports of Drzewiecki sceneries under XP12 range from fine to a simulator that will not launch. Buy Nimbus's KORD v4 for $29.95 if you want O'Hare, buy Drzewiecki's own KMDW XP12 for $20.00 if you want Midway, and use the free Gateway KORD in the meantime. Between them that is $50 for two airports that are current, supported and built for the simulator you own.

If you are still on X-Plane 11 and you fly the Chicago area — buy it, and buy Chicago City XP with it. This is the profile the product was made for and it still serves them well. €58 for the pair gets you a coherent, good-looking, well-lit metropolitan area with three working airports in it, and the join between the two packages is clean. Nothing better exists for X-Plane 11 and nothing better is coming.

If you specifically want Chicago Executive — this is your only option. KPWK has never been done as payware for X-Plane by anyone else, and Drzewiecki's version has the FBOs, the ramp and the surrounding industry. Whether that is worth €38 on its own is your call; be honest with yourself that O'Hare's layout is six years out of date and Midway has a better XP12 replacement, so you are effectively buying one GA field at full bundle price.

If you fly helicopters — buy Chicago City XP instead. Hudson's advice from January 2020 still holds: the heliports, the hospital pads and the rooftop landing areas are all in the city package, he barely used the airports, and you would save yourself the €38.

If you are buying to fly VATSIM out of O'Hare — no. Your taxi clearances will not match the ground you are looking at. That was true in December 2024 and more taxiways have been corrected since.

Where it stands today

Chicago Airports XP is a good scenery that has been overtaken, and the overtaking was done partly by the real airport, partly by X-Plane 12, and partly by its own developer. The first two are nobody's fault. The third is the awkward part: buying this in 2026 means paying €38 for a bundle whose Midway you can already buy separately, newer and native, from the same company for $20, and whose O'Hare is beaten on layout accuracy by a free community file that was updated last month.

Drzewiecki is not a developer that walked away. KDCA, KMDW and KEWR are all recent, all X-Plane 12, and all evidence of a studio that is working. What they have decided is that the X-Plane 11 catalogue stays where it is, and that Chicago comes back to X-Plane one airport at a time, at a price each. If they get to O'Hare, it will be a separate product, and the people who bought this bundle will pay again. Nothing in six years suggests otherwise.

The honest reading of the record is that this product's window closed somewhere around 2022 and nobody put a sign on the door. It is still listed, still full price, still the 21st best-selling item in simMarket's history, and the requirement line still says X-Plane 11 — which is accurate, and is the whole warning if you read it. Most people will not read it. That is why this review exists.