FlyTampa Kai Tak: the definitive 1998, locked to simulators nobody is updating

In November 2017 a customer called Jim posted on FlyTampa's support forum asking how to delete an aeroplane. Not an AI aircraft — a wreck. There is a broken China Airlines 747 lying in the water off the end of runway 13 in this scenery, and Jim flew 1960s and 1970s traffic and did not want it there. He was told nothing useful. The wreck is Flight 605, which overran into Victoria Harbour on 4 November 1993, and FlyTampa modelled it as a fixed object because that is what was sitting there for much of the airport's last years. You cannot switch it off. That is the single most honest thing anyone can tell you about this add-on: it is not a Kai Tak, it is a Kai Tak, pinned to a particular handful of years, and it will not bend to yours.

Every other airport review we write opens with the same buried question — is this still the airport as it stands? Here that question has no meaning. Kai Tak closed on 6 July 1998. Nothing has been current about VHHX for twenty-eight years, no NOTAM will ever contradict this scenery, and no apron repaint will date it. The only accuracy question worth asking is which Kai Tak FlyTampa built, because the airport of 1975 and the airport of 1998 were barely the same place, and the answer turns out to be specific and checkable.

The record is unusually clean. FlyTampa put Kai Tak on simMarket on 4 July 2008, rebuilt it for Prepar3D v4 in July 2018, and gave both that rebuild and the 2015 one to existing owners for nothing. It sits at 29 simMarket reviews averaging 4.97 out of 5 — twenty-eight fives and a single four, with not one rating below that in eighteen years — and it is simMarket's number 46 all-time bestseller. There is no giveaway inflating those numbers; we looked, and found discounting instead (25 per cent off in July 2018, 30 per cent off in March 2022) but no free release.

And then it stops. The last line in the changelog is version 2.1, dated 20 February 2019. In April 2020 a customer asked directly whether a Kai Tak update was coming and Martin at FlyTampa replied in nine words: "No KaiTak update is planned in the near future." Six years later that is still the last word. There is no FlyTampa Kai Tak for Microsoft Flight Simulator and none for X-Plane, and requests for both have been sitting unanswered on FlyTampa's own forum since May 2020. The best reconstruction of the most famous approach in aviation lives entirely on FS2004, FSX and Prepar3D — and Prepar3D stopped at a version this scenery has never been formally cleared for.

We read 35 sources for this review: FlyTampa's own product, order, download and support pages, twenty threads across their support forum and AVSIM going back to 2008, the simMarket listing and its full rating spread, four community videos, the competing Kai Taks on the newer simulators, and the retro-AI project that supplies the airlines FlyTampa did not. Reddit is structurally unavailable to us, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; for a product this old, with a store rating this consistent and a forum this well-archived, that gap matters less than it would for a new release.

What you are actually buying

One purchase, one serial, three separate installers. That is not a variant list — it is the same product compiled three times for three generations of Microsoft-lineage simulator, and your simMarket or BMT Micro account shows all three.

Installer	Version	Size	Covers
FlyTampa_HongKong_FS9_10.exe	1.0	36.10 MB	FS2004
FlyTampa_KaiTak_FSX_P3D_13.exe	1.3 (3 Nov 2015)	123.85 MB	FSX, FSX:SE, P3D v1–v3
FlyTampa Universal Installer P3Dv4 P3Dv5	2.0 / 2.1 (20 Feb 2019)	211.90 MB	P3D v4, P3D v5

The simulator list on the store is wrong by omission, and so is every aggregator that repeats it. FlyTampa's own product page lists FS2004, FSX, P3Dv3, P3Dv4 and P3Dv5 — five generations, not one. Nothing anywhere on FlyTampa's site mentions Prepar3D v6. When a customer asked in December 2023, a FlyTampa staffer's answer was to point the Universal Installer at the v6 folder and see; another customer reported that working in February 2024, but for St Maarten, not for Kai Tak. Treat v6 as unsupported and probably fine, which is not the same as supported.

One thing the previous FlyTampa reviews in this series turned up does not apply here. Several of their legacy titles carry an asterisk against P3Dv4 and P3Dv5 on the order page and need a compatibility patch fetched from a forum thread, in one case with files deleted by hand between steps. Kai Tak carries no asterisk. It is one of the ten products the P3Dv4/v5 Universal Installer handles natively, and it is absent from both the v4 and v5 patch bundles because in July 2018 it got a full rebuild instead. Nor is it labelled "(Legacy Product)" — FlyTampa's support page defines that as their own tag for add-ons "not up to our current design standards anymore", and eleven titles carry it. Kai Tak does not.

Price, and why we are not calling a winner

simMarket lists it at €31.00. FlyTampa sell it direct through BMT Micro at $31.00 USD, with no tax position stated anywhere on the order page. simMarket's terms say displayed prices include the applicable VAT, which is 0 per cent for an unresolved session, so the €31.00 you see is a pre-tax figure that may grow at checkout depending on where you are. Two different currencies, two different tax bases, no honest comparison available without a resolved cart. Buy wherever your existing library lives — the 2018 rebuild appeared automatically in simMarket download histories, which is the smoother path for anyone who bought there originally.

Which Kai Tak this is

The evidence points at 1994–1998, and it is consistent across the product:

• The CI605 wreck in the harbour dates from 4 November 1993.
• FlyTampa's own free companion traffic file uses, in Martin's words, "schedules from 1998" — and he has said outright that modern Chek Lap Kok schedules are "hard enough for Kai-Tak to handle", because the airport in 1998 handled fewer movements than VHHH does now.
• The developer's own screenshots settle the rest: Cathay Pacific in the brushwing livery introduced in September 1994, the HAECO hangar, the clock-tower terminal frontage reading "Hong Kong International Airport Kai Tak", Salem tobacco billboards on the Kowloon City rooftops, period double-deckers on Prince Edward Road.

The reconstruction is dense where it matters and thins out beyond it. Kowloon City — the rooftops that make the runway 13 turn what it is — is modelled building by building, with neon, water tanks, laundry, roads and traffic. The wider territory is a general Hong Kong model rather than a policed 1998 one: FlyTampa confirmed on their forum that the add-on "does not change the new airport at all", so Chek Lap Kok sits there in whatever state your simulator has it, an airport that in this scenery's own timeline had not opened yet. If you want a period-correct Hong Kong Island skyline as well as a period-correct Kai Tak, this is not policing that for you.

The approach

This is the part that earns the money. FlyTampa model the Checkerboard Hill panel itself, ship a PDF chart set for VHHX, and rebuilt the IGS 13 lighting and halos in version 2.0. Version 2.0 also added the TH VOR, which a customer immediately noticed made the missed approach match the historical plates. There is a dedicated VHHX_APPROACH.BGL waypoint file so that AI aircraft attempt the curve rather than flying through Beacon Hill — more on how well that works below. Navigraph carry VHHX in their FMS data, so a PMDG or Aerosoft FMC will accept it; Navigraph Charts do not, which is why FlyTampa bundle their own.

What is not in the box

No airline AI traffic. No period liveries. That is the gap, and it is a real one for a scenery whose entire proposition is a specific year.

What the community consistently praises

Performance that does not make sense for the detail on screen. This is the most repeated finding in the record, across a decade and across every source class. "Look at Kai Tak, so darn detailed, to the max, yet almost no impact on frames" (AVSIM, November 2015). "The performance optimization is absolutely amazing both day and night" (AVSIM, July 2018). "It looks and performs impeccably even on slower systems" (simMarket, February 2019). FlyTampa's own recommended specification is a Core 2 Duo and an 8600 GT, hardware from 2007, and nobody in eighteen years has seriously argued it needs more.

The approach itself. Not one source disputes it. A simMarket buyer in March 2020 wrote that he was "one inch away from purchasing Dubai, yet the magical runway 13 manual approach (and the Hong Kong skyline) got in the middle, and Dubai lost the fight". An AVSIM poster who had just flown his first one wrote "how I didn't clip a building I'm not quite sure." A customer who was actually at Kai Tak in 1996 said the product was "well worth the money" and that he "found more buildings than I expected".

The city, not just the airport. The Kowloon City rooftops are the reason the turn works, and reviewers consistently talk about the scenery as a Hong Kong add-on rather than an airport add-on. It coexists cleanly with third-party modern VHHH sceneries — an AVSIM poster running WF Scenery's VHHH alongside it in P3D v5.2 in August 2021 reported no frame cost and no modifications needed.

Night. Animated light beams, haze glow, and a fireworks display that runs on the hour from 8pm to midnight in ten-minute bursts. Version 2.0 added city streetlights, dynamic lighting, wet/rain effects and a low-visibility airport lighting option; version 2.1 made the airport lighting come up automatically in fog. The one complaint attached to it is charming: a customer in March 2024 wished the fireworks had sound.

Free upgrades, for eighteen years. The 2015 update and the 2018 rebuild both went to existing owners at no charge, and customers who had originally bought the FS9 version got the FSX one thrown in. This is the single most consistent thing anyone says about FlyTampa as a company, and the record supports it.

What keeps coming up as a problem

You have to build 1998 yourself. Still open, and by design. The installer ships static GA aircraft and nothing else that flies. FlyTampa host a free Traffic_WoA_VHHX_Special.bgl with genuine 1998 schedules, but it invokes World of AI and expects roughly thirty-two separate airline packages installed first, and it generates phantom duplicate flights at every other airport in the world with a Hong Kong service. Customers have spent years papering over this: rebuilt versions of the file for MyTraffic 6, AIG and Ultimate Traffic Live posted by a user in mid-2019; hand-edited airport lookup tables to make TrafficGlobal see VHHX at all; and a Japanese retro-AI site whose 1998 flight plans and old liveries an AVSIM poster recommended in July 2018 as the real answer. None of that is FlyTampa's work, and none of it is in the box.

AI cannot fly the checkerboard reliably. Still open. In May 2018 a customer watched an AI aircraft fly the IGS course through a hill in P3D v4.2. Martin's reply is the clearest statement of the problem anyone has given: the VHHX_APPROACH.BGL file makes AI attempt the turn, but "some (or many)" AI aircraft configuration files have flight-model limits that will not permit it, and "there is no easy way to get them all working". A year later another customer gave up and disabled 31 departures in the AFCAD because his 747s kept flying into the mountains. Not fixable at the scenery end, and not fixed.

Missing lights, in various places. Mitigated. A March 2020 simMarket reviewer reported missing runway lights and noted, without complaint, that "the forum has the answer" — there is a thread for it. A customer in April 2021 reported taxiway lights missing on the east apron only. These are the kind of scenery-library-ordering faults FlyTampa's Configurator and the "Add-to-P3D.cmd" routine exist to fix, and the fixes work, but they are user-diagnosed rather than patched out.

See-through terminal buildings at night in P3D 5.3 HF2. Unresolved by the developer. Reported January 2022 with screenshots. The reporter fixed it himself the same day by recompiling the building BGL in ModelConverterX and posted the file. Another customer on a slightly earlier 5.3 build could not reproduce it. FlyTampa never replied. That is the pattern with this product after February 2019: the community patches it and the developer does not appear.

AI ship wakes broke in P3D v4.5. Still open, and not FlyTampa's fault. In May 2019 a customer posted screenshots of mangled wakes behind the Star Ferry and the junks. Martin reproduced it, traced it to Lockheed Martin's effects engine changing behaviour between builds — he listed 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 flipping effect polygons back and forth — and said he would wait for the next Prepar3D build before doing anything. He offered a dummy effects file to hide the wakes entirely. There is no record of a follow-up.

Default autogen tower blocks standing on the apron and in the approach path. Probably fixed, unconfirmed. Reported repeatedly through 2017 in P3D v4. Martin's answer in November 2017 was candid — "I haven't gotten to updating HK yet. Those are some new type of Autogen or hand placed. Probably need a proper exclude." The July 2018 rebuild recompiled the whole airport, and the complaint stops appearing after it, but no changelog line claims the fix.

The Aerosoft boxed copy was a second-class citizen. Buyers of the retail box waited from November 2015 to late February 2016 for the 1.3 update, with FlyTampa and Aerosoft publicly not communicating; in December 2015 an Aerosoft staffer told German customers FlyTampa were not responding. When P3Dv5 support arrived in 2020, box owners again had to email FlyTampa and request a new serial by hand. Resolved, but slowly, and twice.

Performance and stability

The consensus here is close to unanimous and it holds up under scrutiny: for the geometry on screen, this scenery is extraordinarily cheap. Multiple independent reports over ten years, across FSX, P3D v3, v4 and v5, say the frame cost is negligible even on modest machines, and the 2018 rebuild made it faster rather than slower.

There are two dents. The first is dynamic lighting. On 25 July 2018, days after the rebuild, a customer reported bad stutters whenever the aircraft moved onto lit stands with dynamic lighting enabled in the Configurator, and no stutter at all with the older polygon lighting option — and he was explicit that the same setting behaved fine at FlyTampa's Corfu, Dubai and Athens. Another customer told him it must be his machine. Both may be right: P3D v4-era dynamic lighting was famously hardware-sensitive, and the Configurator lets you turn it off, which is the practical answer.

The second is stranger and never got one. In November 2021 a customer on an i9-11900K with a 3080 Ti and P3D v5.2 reported two or three half-second stutters at fixed points during the turn onto 13, and then found the same stutters when panning anywhere in the airport area. He suspected building density, noted he had never had them on his much older machine, and said Kai Tak was the only airport doing it. Nobody replied. It is one report, so we are not scoring it heavily, but it is the only performance complaint in the record that survives the usual explanations, and it is from the newest hardware in the sample.

Stability itself is not an issue. There are no crash-to-desktop threads of substance, no out-of-memory pattern of the kind that dogged FlyTampa's Amsterdam in 32-bit sims, and the P3Dv4/v5 build installs self-contained and can be moved off the simulator drive afterwards.

Who should buy it

If you fly Prepar3D v4 or v5 and you have ever wanted to shoot the checkerboard, buy it now and stop reading. It is the best version of the most famous approach in aviation, it costs about the same as a mid-range MSFS airport, and the developer has told you plainly there will be nothing better from him. There is no future version to wait for.

If you still run FS2004 or FSX, buy it — this is one of the few payware sceneries where the legacy build is not a consolation prize. The FS9 and FSX installers are in the same purchase, the 1.3 build has the jetways and the shader work, and a 2024 simMarket reviewer bought it specifically as a reason not to retire his FSX collection.

If you fly Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 or 2024, do not buy this, and do not wait for FlyTampa either. There is no MSFS version and no upgrade path, because there is no successor product to upgrade to — this is a different situation from FlyTampa's Athens or Amsterdam, where an MSFS title exists and the only question is whether an upgrade SKU came with it. Requests on FlyTampa's own forum from May 2020, September 2021, March 2024 and June 2024 have gone unanswered. Buy Model Instruments' Kai Tak 1998 instead at €12.90 — it is the same era, it is rated 4.6 across 7 simMarket reviews, and it is less than half the money. Red Wing's VHHX at €19.00 is the other option and the community view of it, stated bluntly on FlyTampa's own forum in December 2020, was "don't bother with the redwings one it's awful"; it is still at version 0.3.9 five years on.

If you fly X-Plane, this does nothing for you. FlyTampa have never made a Kai Tak for it and have not answered the two threads asking. The X-Plane.org freeware VHHX sceneries are where you go.

If you want a busy 1998 Kai Tak with period airline traffic and you are not willing to spend an evening with World of AI, AI Flight Planner and a text editor, do not buy this yet. The airport will be beautiful and empty apart from parked GA aircraft, and assembling the fleet that makes it live is genuinely a project. Read the AI threads before you pay, not after.

If you already own it, there is nothing to do. Version 2.1 from February 2019 is the current and final build, it is P3Dv5-compatible through the Universal Installer with no patch required, and the reports suggest it will install into P3D v6 if you point the installer at the right folder.

Where it stands today

Kai Tak is the strangest product in FlyTampa's catalogue and the only one where abandonment does not obviously matter. A modern airport scenery frozen in February 2019 would be seven years of terminal extensions and repainted taxiways out of date. This one is frozen against a subject that has not moved since 1998, and the only things that have aged are the simulators underneath it — which is why the entire case against buying it is a platform argument rather than a quality one.

That argument is real, though, and it is getting worse. Prepar3D v6 exists and FlyTampa have never acknowledged it in writing. The Universal Installer still works, staff have suggested pointing it at a v6 installation and one customer has confirmed that route on a different FlyTampa airport, but nobody has published a Kai Tak v6 report and nobody at FlyTampa has offered one. Meanwhile the community's own workarounds — a recompiled building BGL, four rebuilt traffic files, hand-edited AFCADs, an airport lookup table entry copied out of a forum post — have quietly become part of the product, because the developer stopped patching it and the users did not stop flying it.

What has not aged at all is the thing you buy it for. Twenty-eight years after the last 747 came over the rooftops, this is still the most convincing version of that turn that anyone has built for any simulator, and the evidence that it works is a store rating that has not dropped below four stars in eighteen years and a forum where the complaints are about traffic files rather than about the airport. FlyTampa built a time machine, aimed it at 1994 to 1998, got it right, and walked away. The machine still runs.