Istanbul Atatürk LTBA: Taxi2Gate still sell the airport as if it were open

At 02:44 on 6 April 2019, Turkish Airlines flight TK54 rolled at Istanbul Atatürk and climbed away towards Singapore. It was the last scheduled commercial departure the airport would ever handle. The IATA code IST went with the traffic to the new field up on the Black Sea shore, and Atatürk — 86 years old, Europe's fifth-busiest airport as recently as 2017 — was reassigned the code ISL and left to the business jets.

Taxi2Gate's LTBA is still on sale. It costs €23.99, which is exactly what simFlight recorded when it reviewed the scenery on 2 April 2014. The store page still opens with the words "is the main international airport serving Istanbul, Turkey and the biggest airport in Turkey by total number of passengers", and still quotes the 2013 traffic figure of 51 million passengers as though that were news. Nowhere on the listing, and nowhere on taxi2gate.org, does anything tell a buyer that the airport shut.

That is the whole review, and it is more interesting than it sounds — because the scenery is good. Forty-six store reviews average a true 4.83. The night lighting was the thing reviewers wrote paragraphs about. It runs on a 165 MB install and it flies beautifully. What Taxi2Gate built in the winter of 2013–14 is a careful, affectionate, detailed record of a place that no longer exists, and there is a real argument for owning one of those.

The trouble is that the store is not selling it as a record. It is selling it as an airport, in the present tense, to people who will install it, load an AI traffic package built against a current schedule, and find a 34-gate international terminal with nothing in it.

We read 30 sources for this one: the simMarket listing and its full star breakdown, the developer's own site and every update file still hosted on it, nine AVSIM threads running from March 2014 to November 2020, simFlight's contemporary review and its complete Taxi2Gate news index, FSElite's developer archive, three videos, the Turkish AIP picture as described by current business-aviation operators, and a community MSFS mod built specifically to delete the runways this scenery still models. Reddit is structurally unavailable in our research environment, so the sentiment-at-a-glance read that would normally sit alongside the forum record is missing here, as it is on every review we publish.

What you are actually buying

One SKU. There has never been another.

	Sim support	Price	Last touched
Taxi2Gate LTBA FSX P3D (PID 8266)	FSX SP2/Acceleration, FSX:SE, P3D v1, P3D v2	€23.99	9 June 2015
Bundle: any 2 or 3 of LTBA, Hamad FSX, Orlando KMCO FSX, Seattle KSEA FSX	as above	€20.00 each	—
SceneryTR LTFM İstanbul Airport (the airport that replaced it)	P3D v4, v5	€25.00, currently €17.50	2020 release
AC Scenery City3D Istanbul (city, sold as LTBA-compatible)	P3D v4, v5	€15.00	2022 release
Freeware LTBA 2008 by Gokhan Bayrakdar (FS9)	FS2004	free	2 November 2009

The install is 165.02 MB and the store lists it as available since 8 March 2014. The requirements line reads "FSX SP2/Acceleration, P3DV1, PD3V2" — typo and all — and that is the one piece of the listing that is scrupulously honest. Taxi2Gate never claimed this works in Prepar3D v4 or v5. It stops at v2, which shipped in 2013.

Plenty of people run it in v4 and v5 anyway, unofficially, and AC Scenery were confident enough about that to print "Compatible with Taxi2Gate Ataturk Airport LTBA" on a product they released in August 2022. It mostly works. When it does not, there is nobody to ask.

What is in the box

Custom photoreal ground out to roughly 50 square kilometres, custom mesh, hand-placed autogen, an accurate coastline, volumetric grass, moving jetways on Ctrl+J, animated service traffic, rotating radar dishes, and — added in the first update — visual docking guidance at the terminal gates. Both passenger terminals, the control tower, the multi-storey car park, the Turkish Technic and MNG hangars, the engine test cell, the general aviation terminal, the two cargo buildings, the old tower, the fire stations, and the hardened shelters of the military side south of 05/23. There is no configurator. There are no options at all.

Every update ever released

The developer's own updates page still hosts four files for LTBA, and the server timestamps date them precisely:

• LTBA-AF.BGL — the AFCAD — 8 March 2014, release day
• ltba-upd1.1.rar — the general update — 13 March 2014
• LTBA-P3D-FIX.rar — flickering terminal textures, Prepar3D only — 29 May 2015
• LTBA/LTBA-AF.BGL — the runway lights fix — 9 June 2015

That is the complete list. Nothing has changed in this product since 9 June 2015. To put that in the order the sim world actually happened: the last time Taxi2Gate touched Istanbul Atatürk, Prepar3D v3 had not shipped, and the real airport had another three years and ten months of scheduled flying left in it.

What the community consistently praises

The buildings, and specifically the jetways. simFlight's April 2014 review called the jetway detail "probably the best I've seen so far in any airport I've had the pleasure of reviewing" — modelled hoses, cabling, air-conditioning units, vent pipes, a modelled platform and accordion flange at the business end rather than a flat texture. Eleven years later a store reviewer named Ken was still writing, in November 2016, that it was "a stunning airport product" and that it ran superbly on FSX: Steam Edition. The praise is remarkably stable across the whole record.

The night. This is the single most consistently admired thing about the package. simFlight devoted a full section to it: ground fixtures that cast a glow rather than sitting as flat dots, a visible halo under the apron pole lights, lit interiors and brightly lit signage. It is genuinely period-defining work for a 2014 FSX airport, and it is why the runway-lighting bug described below stung as much as it did.

Coverage beyond the fence. The scenery does not stop at the airport boundary. Photoreal ground, an accurate coastline and hand-placed structures carry out across Yeşilköy, and Ken's 2016 review picks out the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, both Bosphorus bridges and the Beşiktaş stadium as part of the package. For an airport add-on of that era this was unusual generosity.

It is light. 165 MB, and reviewers of the day flew heavy aircraft into it without trouble. See below.

The fixes are still free and still up. Every patch Taxi2Gate ever released for this airport is still hosted on taxi2gate.org and still returns a 200. For a developer that has published nothing since July 2023, that is more than several of their contemporaries manage.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Runway lighting in Prepar3D — fixed, eventually

On 30 October 2014 an AVSIM user asked whether anyone had working runway lighting at LTBA in P3D v2.4. The answers came back split: taxiway and building lighting fine, runway lights absent, apron light umbrellas sitting too low, and "awful shimmering of glass panels". One respondent had quietly edited the AFCAD himself to make the lights work. Taxi2Gate released a hotfix BGL on 17 December 2014, seven weeks later, and it works — but eleven years on it is still a manual file copy into the Prepar3D add-on scenery folder, not something the installer does for you. Status: fixed, but only if you go and find it.

Terrain elevation outside the airport — never fixed

Reported on AVSIM on 27 March 2014, three weeks after release: ground "sinking so it is like a roller-coaster ride" outside the airport boundary. simFlight found the same thing independently a week later — buildings floating in the air or stuck into the side of a hill. Both sources agree the artefacts are limited and largely invisible from inside the airport, and the usual culprit turned out to be interaction with third-party mesh and Orbx elevation corrections. The scenery's own flatten file is part of the picture, and disabling it makes things worse. Status: still open, mitigable by configuration.

Missing PAPI light fixtures — never fixed

simFlight flagged it in April 2014 and noted they had found the same omission in Taxi2Gate's Bratislava. It is a small thing that a visually meticulous product should not have got wrong, and nothing in the update history addresses it. Status: still open.

Aircraft that do not fit their gates — never fixed

Also April 2014: wings clipping through jetways at some stands. simFlight noted it had already been raised on the developer's forum. That forum is gone (see below), and so is any record of a fix. Status: still open.

The airport itself changed, and the scenery did not

On 31 May 2016 a store reviewer named Ali Rıza wrote, in six words that turned out to be the whole story: "There are a lot of scenery changes It really need a update." He was joined by Mehmet on 5 April 2016 asking for P3D v3, by Enis in January 2016, by Raphael in August 2018 hoping for v4, and by Ramtin as recently as 1 April 2024 asking for MSFS. Five separate customers over eight years, all asking for the same thing, in the shop window, under a five-star average. Status: still open, and now permanent.

The update Taxi2Gate promised and never shipped

This is the sharpest finding in the record. On 7 April 2018 an AVSIM thread about the developer's disappearance quoted their Facebook page from 1 March 2018, verbatim:

"some people are asking about updates for p3d v4, soon we will update vhhh, ltba, othh and more previous airport"

Hong Kong got its v4/v5 build in April 2020. Hamad got OTHH-V2 for v4/v5 in November 2021. Istanbul, named in the same sentence, got nothing. It is absent from the developer's entire "Updates P3D v4 & v5" page, which carries entries for EDDM, LFPG, KSEA, KIND and OTHH-V2. Status: abandoned.

Support does not exist

taxi2gate.org still offers two forum links. forum.iflysimx.com does not resolve at all — no DNS record, connection refused. www.iflysimx.com/forum/62-support/ returns 404 on what is now an unrelated Squarespace site; the bare domain still answers, the forum does not. What is left is an email form that warns you your message will be ignored without an order number and a screenshot. On AVSIM, a user posting on 19 November 2020 about black apron textures in P3D v4.5 received exactly zero replies. Status: still open, and structural.

Performance and stability

This is the part of the record with no argument in it. A 165 MB airport built for FSX SP2 in 2013 is a light airport by any standard, and it was light then. Store reviewer Nigel, November 2020: "Great scenery, excellent detail and performance." Julien, July 2015, reported it staying fluid with the PMDG 777 loaded. A 2014 walkthrough video by Fly747X and the developer's own promotional video from 10 March 2014 both show the airport running without visible strain on hardware of the period.

The known stability problems are all installation-layer rather than runtime. The one Windows-specific complaint in the store record is Marc's, from 29 September 2016, about the installer misbehaving after a Windows 10 update — a simMarket wrapper issue rather than a scenery one, and he said as much while still giving it four stars. In Prepar3D v4 and v5, where the product is not supported, users report black autogen textures (for which the developer's flicker fix helps) and black apron textures (for which nothing does).

The AFCAD is the other soft spot. On 6 November 2018 a user trying to get AI traffic to depart 35L and land 05 found aircraft landing on 23 instead, and posted an unanswered request for a working AFCAD. In FSX-era terms that is a solvable problem with a third-party editor, and several people have solved it privately. It is not solvable through the developer.

Who should buy it

The FSX or P3D v1/v2 flyer who wants Atatürk as it was. Buy it. This is the best rendition of pre-closure LTBA that exists for those simulators, it is priced the same as it was in 2014, and there is no risk that a better one is coming. Go in knowing you are buying a museum piece and it delivers exactly what it promises.

The historical-schedule flyer. Buy it, and buy it with intent. If you fly 2014 Turkish Airlines schedules, or a period AI traffic package, or you are recreating routes that no longer exist, this scenery and that hobby fit together perfectly. Pair it with AC Scenery's City3D Istanbul if you are on P3D v4 or v5 and want the city to match.

The Prepar3D v4 or v5 user who just wants a good Istanbul. Do not buy it. You would be paying €23.99 for a product whose store page tells you plainly it supports neither of your simulators, from a developer who cannot answer an email, to fly into an airport that has no traffic. SceneryTR's LTFM covers v4 and v5 properly and is currently €17.50 — less than the closed airport costs.

The online flyer. Do not buy it. On VATSIM or IVAO in 2026 you will be the only aircraft at LTBA, cleared by nobody, at a field the Istanbul controllers have no reason to staff. The whole point of a 34-gate international terminal is the other 33 aircraft.

The MSFS or MSFS 2024 pilot. This is not for you and never will be. Taxi2Gate's MSFS catalogue is two airports — Pointe-à-Pitre in February 2023 and Orlando in mid-2023 — and Istanbul was not on the list they published in February 2023 when they announced the MSFS move. If you want LTBA in MSFS, the community has gone the other way entirely: there is a freeware mod on flightsim.to, roughly 4,000 downloads, whose entire purpose is to delete runways 17L/35R and 17R/35L from the sim so the airport matches reality.

Where it stands today

The real Atatürk is not derelict, and it is not a ghost. It is Istanbul's dedicated business-aviation airport, 24-hour customs, thirty minutes from the city centre, and operators writing about it in April 2026 describe it as the most flexible field in the region precisely because there is no airline traffic to work around. Turkish Airlines still has its headquarters on the campus. But the two parallel runways this scenery models are gone: the 35L/35R site became the Yeşilköy Prof. Dr. Murat Dilmener Emergency Hospital in May 2020, and most of the rest of the asphalt is now the Atatürk Airport National Garden, which opened to the public on 1 November 2025 with more than 20,000 trees on it. Turkish Cargo moved its hub out on 5 February 2022. What is left in daily use is one runway, the general aviation terminal, and the military side.

Which is why we have not scored this product on "accuracy to the real airport" — the label the template would normally use for a scenery — but on fidelity to a moment in time. Currency is not a coherent question here. There is no version of this scenery that could be current and still be worth owning; an accurate 2026 LTBA is a business-jet ramp beside a park. The only sensible test is whether Taxi2Gate captured the airport as it stood in the winter of 2013–14, and by and large they did, with the misses noted above and with a real caveat that Turkish customers were already spotting divergence from the real field by 2016.

The headline score sits below the mean of its own breakdown, and deliberately. The craft in this add-on is 4-plus work. The two areas where it scores worst — support, and value at the price being asked — are the two a 2026 buyer meets first, before they have seen a single texture. Twelve years, no price movement, an update promised in public and never delivered, a support forum whose DNS record has been withdrawn, and a store page that describes a closed airport in the present tense: that is what you are transacting with, and it is not what €23.99 usually buys.

Its rank is real, incidentally, and worth separating from its rating. All-time #48 on simMarket is a genuine lifetime-units figure earned over more than twelve years of sales into FSX and early Prepar3D, and we found no evidence anywhere in the record that this title was ever given away free — no giveaway entry in simFlight's complete Taxi2Gate news index, no promotion in the store history we could find. The 4.83 star average across 46 reviews is likewise an honest small sample, skewed early: most of those reviews were written when the airport was open.