Munich Airport EDDM: the Taxi2Gate airport that never got its P3D v5 build

Taxi2Gate spent two and a half years bringing their back catalogue forward. Hong Kong got a V2 for Prepar3D v4 and v5 in April 2020. Indianapolis followed in February 2021, Paris Charles de Gaulle that April, Orlando in August, Doha in November, Pointe-à-Pitre in December 2022. Six airports, hauled out of the v4 era and re-issued as new SKUs at full price.

Munich was not one of them. It is their thirty-eighth best-selling product of all time on simMarket — two places below Hong Kong and four below Paris, both of which got the treatment — and it sat there through the whole exercise, untouched, on the build they shipped on 24 September 2017. That is still the newest EDDM Taxi2Gate have ever made, and on the evidence of the last three years it is the last one they ever will.

This matters more than it sounds, because it inverts the thing we found at the other two Taxi2Gate airports we have looked at. At Paris and at Hong Kong the trap was a superseded listing: an older SKU still on the shelf at the same money, quietly outranked by a newer build the page never mentioned. Munich has two SKUs as well — the December 2015 FSX/P3D v1–v3 original and the 2017 P3D v4 rebuild — but the link in front of you is already the newer one, and it says so, and it offers the old owners their €5 upgrade in plain text on the page. For once the store is being straight with you. The problem is what it is being straight about.

So the question here is not which Munich to buy from Taxi2Gate. It is whether a seven-hundred-megabyte airport frozen at 2017, sold at the same €23.99 it has cost since the week it launched, on a simulator version the rest of its own catalogue has moved past, is still worth the money in 2026. The record on that is genuinely split, and the split runs along a line that turns out to be easy to state.

This review is drawn from 17 sources: both simMarket listings and their full rating spreads, four AVSIM threads spanning December 2015 to late 2022, the developer's own site and store copy, trade coverage from FSElite, simFlight and MSFS Addons, two YouTube videos, and the competing product's own listing. Reddit is structurally unavailable in our research environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing here; for a nine-year-old P3D scenery the long AVSIM threads carry that weight well enough.

What you are actually buying

Two products, both live, both €23.99, both sold only through simMarket. Taxi2Gate have no store of their own — taxi2gate.org is a shop window whose "Buy Now" button points straight at simMarket, exactly as it does for Paris and Hong Kong.

SKU	Released	Simulators	Size	Store rating
Munich Airport EDDM FSX P3D (PID 9947)	21 December 2015	FSX SP2/Acceleration, P3D v1, v2, v3	527 MB	4.27 from 41 reviews
Munich Airport EDDM P3D (PID 11215)	24 September 2017	P3D v4 only	601 MB	4.58 from 12 reviews

The one you want is the second. It is the one this review scores, and it carries an explicit update offer: previous purchasers of the FSX build get it for €5.00, awarded automatically provided you are logged into the account that bought the original.

Note what is not in that table. There is no P3D v5 SKU and no v6 SKU, and FSX owners are on the 2015 build or nothing. simMarket's own headline star ratings round generously in both cases — the P3D v4 page shows a flat "5" over a spread of 10/0/1/1/0, which is 4.58, and the FSX page shows "4" over 27/4/5/4/1, which is 4.27. Both are good numbers. Neither is the number printed at the top of the page.

The v5 gap has a workaround rather than a fix, and simMarket's own buyers are the ones documenting it. "It isn't fully compatible with Prepar3D v5," wrote a customer called Lucas in January 2021, "but inibuilds have an exclude file which works like a charm!" Another, in August 2020, answered the question by linking a YouTube walkthrough. That is a community patching around an absent product, and it is the store's review section doing a job the store's requirements line does not.

Prices are what simMarket displays; its terms state that shown prices include the applicable VAT, which for an unresolved session is 0%, so what you actually pay depends on where you are. There is no cheaper source to compare against, because there is no other source.

What the community consistently praises

Performance, first and by a distance. This is the finding that repeats across every year of the record and never wobbles. "Excellent FPS and smooth, good VAS usage," runs one store review; another, in November 2017, could not believe "how crisp it looks and how smooth it runs with 60+ FPS." A German buyer the previous month noted that dynamic lighting ran without frame drops on a GTX 1060 even with every PMDG light switched on. In February 2019 an AVSIM poster reported no issues at all in P3D v4.4 and told the thread simply to get it. A 601 MB airport that renders a major twin-runway hub at that speed was a real achievement in 2017 and is still the product's strongest card.

Night lighting is the second, and it is the one dimension where the scenery still beats the newer competition outright. Flight Tech Media's video review of the rival sim-wings Munich concedes exactly this: the sim-wings product wins in daylight on modelling and colour, but its night presentation is weaker, and the Taxi2Gate airport does the better job after dark. Dynamic lighting was added specifically in the 2017 rebuild, and it landed.

Ground detail is the third. Static clutter, volumetric 3D grass across the whole field, fencing, modelled terminal interiors and reflective surfaces come up again and again, in the store reviews and in the forums, from people who own a lot of European airports. One AVSIM regular in February 2019 called it his favourite German hub. A German buyer in November 2018 put it more bluntly: no comparison with the old Aerosoft airport, and no problems at all under v4.

And there is one piece of support history worth putting on the record, because the developer's reputation is otherwise poor. The December 2015 launch shipped with taxiway bridges that some users could not cross without crashing the aircraft. On 22 December, one day later, an owner posted that Taxi2Gate had emailed him a hotfix, that he had tested it, and that it worked. "A major problem slipped testing but showed on some user systems," he wrote. "An hotfix was produced, tested and shipped to the costumers in 24h time. That's pretty good in my opinion." He was right, and it is the last time anyone in the record says anything like it.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The P3D v5 gap. Still open, and now permanent. This is the whole argument. The 2017 build targets v4 and nothing else; the closest thing to a fix is a third-party iniBuilds exclude file that buyers pass around in the store's own review section. Taxi2Gate demonstrably knew how to do v5 conversions — they did six of them between April 2020 and December 2022 — and Munich was passed over every time.

SODE jetways that do not behave. Still open. In March 2019 two independent AVSIM posters described the same class of fault. One reported jetways sitting roughly three-quarters inside the terminal building at some stands. The other listed, among a longer set of grievances, SODE files wrong enough that the bridges at stands 101 to 105 would not connect to the aircraft at all. The community answer, posted in that same thread, was to install a third-party SODE remake by Cartayna if you own GSX Level 2. Seven years later that is still the answer, and by 2022 a v5 user on AVSIM was citing "no hassle with the SODE gates" as a reason to buy the competitor instead.

Accuracy frozen at the 2017 airport. Still open. The 2015 release actually modelled the Terminal 2 satellite before the real building opened to passengers on 26 April 2016, which was a genuinely forward-looking call, and the 2017 changelog lists further satellite work and the Hilton extension. But the March 2019 audit from an AVSIM poster who clearly knows the airport is a long list of things that were already wrong then: the A380 stands with three jetways on the satellite building missing, the tunnel under the visitors' hill missing, fences missing, the C3 taxiway absent despite having been in service for some time, and stand 107 modelled when it was being dismantled. None of that was ever addressed. By 2022 the head-to-head thread's verdict was that both Munich products share a layout "somewhat outdated when compared to the real life counterpart."

It fights other add-ons. Mitigated, by the user. This one has a nine-year paper trail and four different culprits. December 2015: disable EDDM in UTX Europe or you get default textures mixed into the Taxi2Gate ones. December 2015 again: disable EDDM in MyTraffic 6 "otherwise you'll get very odd results." June 2019: an owner had to disable EDDM in Flight1 Ultimate Terrain to make it run properly. March 2018: a buyer complained it does not sit nicely in Orbx Germany, and that the runways were sometimes there and sometimes "a mush of gravel." Every one of these has a workaround. Every one of them is homework.

Support has stopped existing. Still open. The two support links on taxi2gate.org both fail: forum.iflysimx.com does not resolve in DNS at all, and www.iflysimx.com/forum/62-support/ returns 404. The bare domain does load, but it now serves an unrelated personal site belonging to a sim enthusiast called Clement — the forum has not merely gone quiet, the address has been repurposed. This is not new behaviour, either. On launch day in December 2015 a customer was already posting that he could not register for the support forum because no confirmation email ever arrived.

The price has not moved. €23.99 in December 2015, €23.99 in September 2017, €23.99 today. The rival covering the simulator version Taxi2Gate skipped costs €28.53.

Performance and stability

Nothing in the record contradicts the performance praise, which is unusual and worth saying plainly. Across nine years the complaints are about accuracy, compatibility and support, not about frame rates. The one dissenting note is a January 2021 store review calling it "a bit laggy" while still rating it highly and recommending it, set against multiple reports of 60+ FPS and low VAS use. On a modern machine running P3D v4, this airport is not the thing that will cost you frames.

Stability at launch was another matter, and the December 2015 thread is a rough read: the bridge-crossing crashes, ILS 08L/R carrying old frequencies as late as 26 December, gate markings missing at 306 and misaligned at 307 and 308, 3D grass glowing at night, the whole field glowing red at distance for one user, missing autogen around the perimeter, and a seasonal texture bug that showed the wrong texture set on the current date and could only be dodged by changing the month. "It is just sad to see that customers are treated as beta testers," one poster wrote on 29 December 2015. The 2017 rebuild cleared most of that out. What it did not clear out is now permanent.

The residual risk today is not a crash. It is that P3D v5 and v6 users are installing an airport that was never tested against their simulator, using an exclude file written by somebody else.

Who should buy it

If you fly P3D v4 and Munich is on your route network, buy it. This is the profile the product was built for and it still serves them well. It is fast, it looks good at night, it is dense with clutter, and at €23.99 it is the cheaper of the two credible Munichs. Budget an evening for the compatibility housekeeping.

If you already own the 2015 FSX build, buy the upgrade. €5 for the satellite apron fixes, the SODE jetways, the dynamic lighting, the Hilton extension and the terminal revisions is straightforwardly good value, and it is the single clearest recommendation in this review.

If you fly P3D v5 or v6, do not buy this. Not because it cannot be forced to work — it can, with a third-party exclude file — but because you would be paying full price for an unsupported configuration from a developer who cannot be reached, when sim-wings Pro Munich covers v4.5 and v5 properly for €28.53. Four euros and fifty-four cents is not the deciding factor here.

If you want the real Munich as it is now, neither product will satisfy you, and this one less so. The satellite's A380 stands, the C3 taxiway and the changes since 2017 are not modelled. Spotters and EDDM regulars should know that going in.

If you fly MSFS, there is nothing here for you. Taxi2Gate never made a Munich for it and, on current evidence, never will.

Where it stands today

Taxi2Gate's timeline runs out cleanly. In September 2022 they broke a long silence with a statement on Facebook, quoted in full on AVSIM at the time: they would release Pointe-à-Pitre for P3D v5 first, "and we will continue to make updates but mainly we will update our sceneries to MSFS." They did exactly the first part — TFFR for v5 landed on 5 December 2022. In February 2023 they told FSElite they were near release on their first MSFS airport and working on Orlando and Paris, and that they would "next bring all our previous sceneries." Pointe-à-Pitre for MSFS arrived on 19 February 2023 and Orlando on 14 July 2023.

Nothing has been added to their simMarket catalogue since. That is three years and one month of silence as of this writing, against a promise to port the whole back catalogue, and it squares with what our Paris and Hong Kong reviews found independently. The forums where you would have raised a ticket are gone. The store copy on the Munich page still describes an airport "handling 39.7 million passengers in 2014"; Munich handled 41.6 million in 2024.

The honest summary is that this is a good 2017 airport that has been left exactly where it was. The score reflects that gap rather than the flying — every breakdown area that measures what the scenery does is 3.8 or better, and the headline sits lower because compatibility, support and value are the things a 2026 buyer actually collides with. Owners on v4 keep saying it is one of the best airports they own, and the record backs them. It is just that the set of people for whom that sentence is still true gets smaller every year, and Taxi2Gate stopped doing anything about it a long time ago.