FlyTampa Dubai Rebooted: the developer said an update was planned, in 2017

On 19 February 2017 a customer called Timm posted a polite question in FlyTampa's Dubai forum: any chance of an update for the new Terminal 1 stands and the changes at the holding point for runway 30L? Martin, the developer who built the scenery, answered the same evening in three words. "Its planned yes."

The thread is still there. The replies underneath it are all people saying how pleased they are. Nine years later, nothing has come of it, and that is a stranger story than the usual one about a developer walking away. Martin has not walked away from anything — he was posting release notes for Las Vegas V3.2 in MSFS 2024 on 28 January 2026. FlyTampa are one of the busiest and best-regarded scenery teams in the hobby, with a live MSFS catalogue and a support forum where questions from July 2026 get answered within hours. They simply never went back to Dubai. The airport, which is in the business of never standing still, kept building without them.

So the thing on sale in 2026 is a 2012 scenery whose last content update landed on 3 November 2015, and which models an OMDB that stopped matching the real one in February 2016 when Concourse D opened. It is also, on simMarket's own numbers, the twentieth best-selling product of all time on that store, holding 53 ratings that average 4.85. Both of those sentences are true at once, and the gap between them is what this review is about.

We read 23 sources: the developer's product page and price list, eleven threads on FlyTampa's own support forum going back to 2004, the full 53-rating spread on simMarket, contemporary written reviews from simFlight and AirDailyX, three AVSIM threads, two video showcases, and the store listings for the product that now owns Dubai in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Reddit is blocked in this environment and we could not read it, which matters more than usual here: the sentiment-at-a-glance check on a fourteen-year-old legacy title is exactly what Reddit is good for, and we are working without it.

What you are actually buying

One product, one price, no variants and no upgrade path. The briefing that sent us here listed this as a P3Dv5 title; it is considerably more than that, and slightly less.

Product	FlyTampa-Dubai Rebooted
Developer	FlyTampa (the scenery is Martin's work)
Current version	2.4, released 3 November 2015, plus separate P3Dv4 and P3Dv5 patch installers
Direct from FlyTampa	$31.00, checkout handled by BMTMicro
simMarket	€31.00 as displayed to a session with no country resolved — simMarket's terms say prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for that session means none
Launch price, November 2012	€26.00 excluding VAT
Download	838MB
Simulators	FS2004, FSX (DX9), P3D v3, P3D v4\*, P3D v5\*
In the box	Dubai International (OMDB); Dubai city on custom mesh and photoreal with hand-built landmarks; 18 landable heliports; the Skydive Dubai strip (OMSD)
Not in the box	OMDW Al Maktoum, OMSJ Sharjah, Concourse D

Three corrections to make before anything else.

The platform list. This is not a P3Dv5 product with a legacy tail; it is a genuine five-simulator release that still installs into FS2004. FlyTampa's own price list carries all five, and simMarket's requirements line reads "FS2004, FSX (DX9), Prepar3D v3/v4/v5". The two asterisks against v4 and v5 are load-bearing, though. They link to compatibility threads, and what those threads tell you is that Dubai never got FlyTampa's Universal Installer. You run the 2015 installer, you untick the option marked "Download Configurator and Libraries", and then you apply a separate patch executable per simulator version. FlyTampa's newer airports install themselves. This one is a three-step manual job, and buyers have been getting it wrong since at least February 2023, when one of them reached the point of asking in public how to get a refund before Martin sorted it out by email.

P3Dv6. Nobody has said Dubai supports it. When a customer asked about v6 in December 2023, FlyTampa's answer was that the Universal Installer lets you browse to the P3Dv6 folder — which is a fine answer for the airports that have a Universal Installer, and no answer at all for this one. The price list stops at v5. Treat v6 as unsupported and undocumented.

The price. The two headline figures look identical and are not. $31.00 direct against €31.00 at simMarket, where simMarket's own currency widget calls that same €31.00 USD 35.98. Neither number includes whatever tax your country adds at checkout, so we will not claim one store is definitively cheaper for you — but on the pre-tax figures each store puts on the screen, buying direct from FlyTampa is about five dollars less. Worth noting too: FlyTampa is listed as both publisher and seller on the simMarket page, so this is not a reseller markup, it is a currency accident.

And a fourth thing, which is the one that actually decides the purchase. FlyTampa have never released a Dubai for Microsoft Flight Simulator, and there is no sign of one. Their MSFS catalogue runs Amsterdam, Athens, Boston, Copenhagen, Corfu, Humberside, Las Vegas, Sydney and Toronto. Dubai is not on it, not previewed, not teased. There is no upgrade, no discount, no migration path, because there is nothing to migrate to. What happened instead is that iniBuilds released their own OMDB for MSFS on 21 December 2023 and a rebuilt Dubai Enhanced for MSFS 2024 on 8 February 2025 at £19.99 before tax, with a £4.99 upgrade for owners of the 2020 version. If you are an MSFS pilot, this review is not about a product you can buy.

What the community consistently praises

Performance, first and loudest, from every generation of source. simFlight's Miguel Blaufuks, reviewing on 27 November 2012, reported that a scenery with this object count "did not bog down my PC". AirDailyX, a fortnight earlier, measured 27–45 FPS in FSX with sliders high. On AVSIM in December 2015 a user reported Dubai showing 600MB less VAS in P3Dv3 than in v2, back when VAS exhaustion was the thing that ended long flights. A simMarket buyer in November 2018 called the frame rates "very good" on a mid-range Windows 7 machine; another, in November 2023, said they were outstanding even with weather and a high-end add-on aircraft loaded. That is eleven years of independent agreement, and it is the single most durable finding about this product.

It is not unanimous, and the dissent is worth printing. A German buyer in March 2017 warned bluntly that the scenery "ist nicht wirklich Frame-freuntlich" — not really frame-friendly — while still recommending it. In June 2017 a P3Dv4 user reported 4 FPS lined up on 30R on a rig that ran 29–32 elsewhere. In both cases the follow-up pointed elsewhere: the second was fixed by deleting stale shaders and configuration files, and Martin's standing advice is to turn features off in the bundled FT-Configurator, which lets you strip the city, the heliports and the dust effects out at will. The tool is a genuine part of the value and it comes up repeatedly.

The city is the real product. Every source that spends more than a paragraph on this scenery ends up talking about Dubai rather than OMDB. simFlight called the skyline recreation "a major highlight of the package" and singled out the Burj Khalifa, Palm Jumeirah, the Atlantis, the World islands, Port Rashid and the elevated Dubai Metro. AirDailyX counted thousands of hand-placed custom buildings and noted the near-total absence of autogen — every building modelled rather than generated, which in 2012 was extraordinary and in 2026 is still why the approach looks the way it does. A buyer in May 2016 said the city modelling alone should sell it to VFR pilots. A November 2013 forum post called it, without qualification, the best scenery he had ever seen.

Night. For a Gulf hub this is the headline feature and it delivers. simFlight devoted a full section to it: signage glow that illuminates the ground in front of each sign, 3D wall-mounted light fixtures on the buildings, interior concourse light visible from distance, and skyscrapers deliberately lit unevenly so not every window is on. AirDailyX called the night textures and lighting the best thing in the product. A 2023 simMarket buyer picked out dusk specifically. The caveat, from two separate forum posts in August 2016 and April 2017, is that the city's streets stay dark — the photoreal base does not take FTX Vector or ORBX Global night lighting, so you get a lit skyline over unlit roads. Both posters asked for it. Neither got it.

Support, when you can reach a human. This cuts against the abandonment narrative and we are printing it because the record says so. The February 2023 buyer stuck on the installer was unstuck by Martin over email within four days. A November 2023 simMarket reviewer described being sent a replacement copy after a problem with a different scenery and called FlyTampa "run by a person of great integrity". As recently as 31 July 2026, george[flytampa] was answering serial-number problems on the forum the same day they were posted. The company answers its post. It just does not build Dubai.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The airport is the airport of 2012, patched to 2015. Still open, and it is the whole complaint. Concourse D at Terminal 1 opened on 24 February 2016 and is not in the scenery. Neither are the reworked remote stands, the taxiway changes, or the conversion of the old cargo area near the C stands into a passenger facility. Martin said so himself on 4 November 2015, the day after 2.4 shipped: "there are no new aprons and buildings in this update. I don't have enough photos of the new terminal and some other areas to build them yet." At least two people with real access — an OMDB airside worker in December 2015 and a UAE air traffic controller in July 2016 — offered in public to supply photographs and an AFCAD correction. Neither offer was taken up in any visible way.

The name. "Rebooted" is FlyTampa's house word for a ground-up rebuild — they also sell Tampa Rebooted and Boston Rebooted — and in 2012 it was accurate, because it replaced their original Dubai from April 2004. It reads very differently in 2026. A forum poster on 12 December 2021 argued the product "should be renamed 'Dubai: Old Airport'" and that continuing to list it as current "deceives the customer". A simMarket reviewer on 22 March 2022, rating it four stars rather than one, made the same argument in gentler words: the title is misleading, the scenery is "a true reflection of Dubai back in 2012". Two people who otherwise like the product arriving independently at the same objection is a finding, not a grumble. Still open.

Not enough parking for modern AI traffic. A buyer on 15 July 2020 reported that a 2019-vintage Emirates and flydubai AI package could not find enough stands, and pointed out that the missing non-Emirates terminal is present even in Ray Smith's freeware OMDB. This one is the practical face of the previous complaint and it is what a network pilot will actually hit. Still open.

Safe gates and SODE jetways in P3D. simMarket's feature list qualifies the docking guidance as "(FS2004 and FSX only)"; FlyTampa's own product page drops the line entirely. A buyer who installed the P3Dv5 patch on 19 February 2022 reported the safe gates gone and got no reply. A request for a SODE jetway update was posted on 1 August 2022, chased in January 2024, and by December 2024 another user was answering it on FlyTampa's behalf with the observation that there would be no further P3D support at all. In December 2024 george[flytampa] confirmed in a separate thread that OMDB "aren't my airports" — the scenery belongs to a colleague whose attention is elsewhere. Still open.

Terminal interiors and close-up detail. A German buyer in January 2020 called the terminals "lieblos" — soulless — next to FlyTampa's own Amsterdam and Copenhagen, while rating the package five stars anyway. simFlight in 2012 noted the fire stations were modelled with empty vehicle bays and no fire trucks anywhere on the field. AirDailyX flagged a lack of depth in the Terminal 3 arrivals and departures levels. A 2023 buyer wanted access stairs on the rooftop helipads. These are small, they repeat, and none of them has ever been fixed. Still open, and honestly minor.

Performance and stability

The one real stability episode is from June 2017, when three separate P3Dv4 users reported crashes to desktop at OMDB — typically after switching to an outside view, typically not reproducible on demand. Martin engaged in the thread within a day, could not replicate it, and asked for tests with a default aircraft and AI off. Over the following three weeks the thread resolved itself in a way that reflects well on the scenery: one user's crashes turned out to be leftover files from an older install, another's low frame rates cleared after deleting stale shader and configuration files, and a third traced his to a workaround he was running for Ultimate Traffic Live. Assign the blame accurately — this was a messy legacy installer and a messy add-on stack, not a broken scenery. There has been no comparable cluster since.

What remains is friction rather than instability. The install is a three-step manual sequence in a product line where everything else is one click, and it goes wrong often enough that the forum has a thread about it as recently as September 2023. VAS behaviour in 32-bit FSX was always the thing to watch and the configurator is the answer; in 64-bit P3D it is a non-issue. Nobody in fourteen years of record has described this scenery as unstable in normal use.

Who should buy it

The P3D pilot who flies Emirates metal and does not care what year the terminal is. Buy it. There is no serious competitor for OMDB in Prepar3D, the city is worth the money on its own, and the performance holds up at a hub where performance is the whole problem. Go direct to FlyTampa for the $31.00 price.

The VFR and helicopter flyer. Buy it, and buy it for the city rather than the airport. Eighteen landable rooftop helipads including one on the flank of the Burj Al Arab, a fully modelled Palm Jumeirah, and a skyline built by hand rather than generated. Nothing else in the legacy simulators does this.

The FS2004 holdout. Buy it. This is one of the last big-hub sceneries still shipping a working FS9 installer, and by every account in the record it runs beautifully there.

The online network flyer with a current AI traffic package. Think hard. Your traffic will not fit, the gate numbering will not match your flight plan, and the concourse that half the world's airlines actually use is absent. If your flying depends on the airport matching a 2026 chart, this will annoy you on every session.

The MSFS pilot: do not buy it. It will not install into your simulator, FlyTampa have no Dubai for MSFS, and there is no upgrade credit waiting for you if they ever make one. Buy iniBuilds' Dubai Enhanced instead — it is a current airport, it is cheaper before tax, and it is the product this one used to be.

Anyone hoping the update is imminent: do not buy on that basis. The promise is nine years old, the developer is demonstrably busy elsewhere, and no P3D content update has shipped for this title since 2015.

Where it stands today

Judged as a piece of scenery construction, Dubai Rebooted is still very good. The modelling holds up, the lighting holds up, and the frame rate holds up in a way that many airports built a decade later do not. Its 4.85 average across 53 simMarket ratings — 49 fives, one four, two threes, one two — is not a fluke of a captive audience; the low ratings are about the airport being out of date, not about the work being poor. If FlyTampa had shipped this in 2012 and then stopped selling it, its reputation would be immaculate.

They kept selling it, and raised the price. €26.00 excluding VAT at launch became €31.00 at simMarket and $31.00 direct, a rise of roughly a fifth, while the airport content went backwards relative to the real OMDB every year. That is the part we cannot square. The most useful thing a prospective buyer can know is that the "Rebooted" in the name refers to a rebuild finished in 2012, not to anything that has happened since — and that the developer's own 2017 commitment to fix that was never retracted, never delivered, and never mentioned again.

Which leaves an honest answer that depends entirely on which simulator you open. In Prepar3D, this is still the best Dubai you can buy and probably always will be, and at $31.00 it is a defensible purchase for anyone who wants the city as much as the airport. In MSFS the question does not arise, because FlyTampa never showed up and iniBuilds did. The score below reflects both readings: a well-made scenery that a buyer will nonetheless feel the age of on every single approach.