MyTraffic 6: the skies are full, and half the airlines in them are dead

On 17 October 2017 Burkhard Renk signed into his own support forum, told his customers that his heart was still misbehaving and that there was no diagnosis yet, mentioned that he had at least been able to retire from his main job, and promised something small. Not new airports. Not new schedules. "I want to concentrate on a simple paint update first," he wrote, "using the existing schedules and airports and just refreshing the liveries."

He never signed in again. His profile carried the fact in a plain grey box until the forum was switched off: joined 5 November 2002, 15,955 posts, last visited 17 October 2017. Underneath it sat the questions nobody answered — Burkhard: How are you feeling? Any news (2 August 2018, 0 replies), Any updates? (20 May 2019), a good-luck note for 2020.

MyTraffic 6 is still on sale. It costs €29.90 on simMarket, where it is the sixteenth best-selling product of all time, and where the requirements line still reads "FSX, FSX-SE, P3D V1, P3DV2.0-2.4, P3DV2.5" — a list of simulators that stops in 2014. The newest airline schedules in the box are Summer 2015. The newest patch is the 6.0a public beta Renk posted on 1 October 2015.

That is the whole review, and it would be an easy and slightly cruel one to write, except that the record does not cooperate. Twenty of the 46 people who rated it on simMarket gave it five stars. It still does something no rival for these simulators does: general aviation, military traffic and airline traffic at equal priority, at 8,262 airports, out of one 1.15 GB download, with historical schedules that go back to the beginning of the jet age. The people who got it working liked it very much. The argument about MyTraffic is not whether it works. It is whether a frozen 2015 photograph of the world is worth €29.90 in 2026, when the free alternative is still being maintained.

This review is built from 20 public sources: the simMarket listing and its full rating spread, the developer's own statements on his now-deleted support forum (read through the Internet Archive), a launch-week hands-on from simFlight.de, seven AVSIM threads spanning December 2015 to July 2024, discussions on the Orbx and A2A forums, three video sources, and the current documentation of the products it competes with. Reddit is blocked in our research environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing here; for a legacy FSX-era product with an active-but-elderly user base, that matters less than it would for a new release, but it is worth saying.

What you are actually buying

One edition, one price, one store.

Product	MyTraffic 6 (simMarket PID 9239), published and sold by B.RENK
Price	€29.90 as displayed. simMarket's terms say listed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for an unresolved session means 0%
Price with German VAT	€35.58 — which is exactly the figure simFlight.de printed on 19 April 2015. The net price has not moved in eleven years
Download / installed	1.15 GB down, 10.5 GB on disk
Officially supported	FSX, FSX: Steam Edition, P3D v1 (1.4 recommended), P3D v2.0–2.5
Actually usable on	P3D v3, v4 and v5, by hand-writing an add-on.xml and deleting the FS9-format models P3Dv4 will not load
Content	201 aircraft models, 5,594 liveries, about 2,140 airlines, 8,262 airports, 5,560,000+ weekly flights
Last update	6.0a — public beta 1 October 2015, thread closed 4 January 2016
Support	None. Developer last seen 17 October 2017; the official forum was taken offline between 25 September 2022 and 5 August 2024

There is no second store and no cheaper one, so the like-for-like price question that usually needs care here does not arise. B.RENK is listed on simMarket as both the publisher and the seller — simMarket is the developer's storefront. The old product domain, mytrafficx.com, is now a parked page offering itself for sale at $2,995. Visiting the official support forum redirects you to a page reading "This forum is no longer available."

For scale on the same shelf and the same VAT treatment: Just Flight's Traffic Global for FSX/P3D is €37.46 on simMarket. Flight1's Ultimate Traffic Live is still sold, but Flight1 has confirmed the developer cannot continue work on it and official support has ended — so the payware field here is not a live one either. AIG's AI Manager and One Click Installer are free, cover about 950 airlines, and were last updated this year.

What the community consistently praises

The coverage, which nothing else on these simulators matches. 8,262 airports with traffic, roughly 1,600 civilian airlines and 400 military units parked at their real home bases, touch-and-go circuits at over a hundred small fields. simFlight.de's launch hands-on (19 April 2015) singled out general aviation at places like Egelsbach as a clear advantage over World of AI, and thirteen years of forum threads have never produced a rival that treats GA as anything but an afterthought. On the A2A forums in November 2018, the recurring complaint about every alternative was exactly that: the airliners are fine, the GA and military are not.

It installs once and it is done. This sounds like faint praise until you price the alternative in hours. AIG — the package everyone now recommends — needs accounts on three separate websites, a copy of the P3D SDK, and roughly 43 GB of downloads before it shows you an aeroplane. One AVSIM poster in July 2024 described leaving it running overnight. MyTraffic hands you the entire world in one file, and the five-star simMarket reviews are almost all variations on the same sentence: once it is working, it is superb.

The historical schedules, which are a genuinely unusual thing to own. The Communicator lets you switch the whole world back through the decades and recompiles the traffic files each time. simFlight.de tested a 1995 plan, found the aircraft landing at Chek Lap Kok instead of Kai Tak because the schedule sets are built against stock FSX airport codes, then fixed it in five minutes by replacing VHHH with VHHX in the plain-text plan files. That is the second thing worth knowing about MyTraffic: the flight plans are text, not a sealed database.

It is cheap to run for what it puts on screen. More on that below, but the models are deliberately simple, and that decision has aged better than anything else in the package.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The schedules stopped in Summer 2015. Still open, and unfixable without the developer.

This is the finding everything else hangs from. The 6.0a beta of October 2015 was a real, careful update — it repainted the US Airways Airbus fleet into American colours and changed the callsigns from CACTUS, which is precisely the work of a developer tracking the real world (US Airways flew its last service on 17 October 2015). Then it stopped.

Eleven years of airline history are simply absent. Transaero folded nine days after that last US Airways flight. Since then: Monarch (2 October 2017), Air Berlin (27 October 2017), Germania and Adria and WOW air (all 2019), Jet Airways (17 April 2019), Thomas Cook (23 September 2019), Germanwings (April 2020), Air Namibia (2021), Alitalia (14 October 2021). All of them still fly in MyTraffic 6, on their 2015 routes, in their 2015 paint. Nothing built since is in the box either — no A220, no 737 MAX, no A321neo, no A330neo, no A350-1000. The newest airframes Renk added were the A350-900 and the 787-9.

Even in 2015, most of the traffic was invented. simFlight.de's reviewer put roughly a third of the advertised 5.56 million weekly flights down to real-world data, with the remainder procedurally generated to fill the map. The marketing describes this openly enough — "where data are limited, on a realistic model" — but the practical effect is what AVSIM's Dave_YVR wrote on 29 August 2018, answering a user baffled by three Emirates aircraft at once at Bangalore: the schedules are "very imaginative", with airlines flying routes "that they don't and have never served." Two people can look at the same apron and one sees a busy, alive airport while the other sees fiction. Both are right.

The installation. Still open, and it is the single largest complaint mass in the record. Twelve of 46 simMarket ratings are one star, and they are almost all the same review. January 2017: "the install is a joke. It is not an automatic installer." June 2017, a buyer who never got it running after hours of effort. July 2018, a 22-year veteran of the hobby, fourteen hours in, seeing one airline with its wings intersecting. March 2019: "Zero stars as too complicated getting it to work. Sent several emails and no reply." September 2021, on AVSIM: Ugh, My Traffic 6! — one reply, from someone who no longer had it installed. September 2023, the most recent rating on the listing: "no auto install. very complicated instructions that dont work... there's no support." The users who succeed keep pointing new buyers at a 2016 YouTube video by a channel called North Key Woodshed, because that video is now more useful than the manual.

It fights your add-on airports. Mitigated by a well-known workaround, never fixed. MyTraffic ships its own AFCAD files for thousands of stock airports, named BR2_*.BGL. Install a payware or freeware airport over the top and you get aircraft parked in the wrong places, or none at all. simFlight.de hit it at Cologne on day one; an AVSIM thread in 2016 traced a near-total loss of traffic in P3D to a conflict with a freeware Dublin. The community's answer, repeated for a decade, is to hide everything in MyTraffic's scenery folder except the traffic BGLs themselves. It works. It is also a thing you have to know.

The models look their age. simFlight.de could not reliably identify aircraft types by eye in 2015 and named the Ryanair 737 nose specifically. On AVSIM in July 2024, a P3D v5 user who had moved to AIG put it more bluntly: MyTraffic "is pretty outdated today... the models are very easy for todays standard and of course the traffic is not actual." Against 2015 freeware this was a defensible trade. Against AIG's current PBR repaints it is not close.

Support. Closed. Renk's illness is not a failing and this review will not treat it as one — he posted honestly, twice, and told people plainly that he could not do what he had done for twenty years. But a buyer clicking Add to cart in 2026 is not told any of it. There is no notice on the listing.

Performance and stability

This is where MyTraffic is better than its reputation, and it is worth saying clearly.

simFlight.de measured it properly at launch: circuits at Cologne and a Cologne–Frankfurt leg in the PMDG 777 under P3D v2.5, with the AI slider at 20–30%. Frame rates sat around 30 and dropped to about 20 on final approach into a heavy add-on Frankfurt; without any add-on traffic the same approach held a little above 20. A measurable cost, not a catastrophic one. The reason is the design: 191 of the 201 models were rebuilt in the lightweight FSX SP2 format, and the package's own claim that it can outperform stock FSX AI is broadly borne out by users who ran it at busy hubs. An AVSIM poster in December 2016 reported smooth frame rates inside the PMDG 737NGX with the traffic capped at 80 aircraft through FSUIPC4 — and capping is the standard advice, because 6.0a increased traffic density enough that users had to drop their sliders by a third to get back to where they were.

Two real complaints. On the A2A forums (15 November 2018) a user who moved to Traffic Global cited MyTraffic's effect on simulator loading times as one of two reasons for leaving: "I remember un-installing it once and what a huge difference in loading times." That is consistent with a package that compiles thousands of traffic BGLs into the scenery library. And crash reports exist — one 2017 simMarket reviewer on a Titan X-class machine reported CTDs on loading, on descent and shortly after departure across FSX, FSX:SE and P3D — but they are isolated rather than systemic, and the far more common failure mode is the flat inverse: no traffic at all, because something in the setup is wrong.

On P3D v4 and later, the package works despite not being sold as compatible. The AVSIM recipe from November 2017 is stable and still circulates: install once, point an add-on.xml at the folder, put MyTraffic's scenery layer below the default traffic, delete the FS9-format models P3Dv4 cannot load, and turn military traffic off if it misbehaves. Cargo traffic works. It is community engineering around a product whose author cannot answer, and it holds up — but it is not support, and nobody should buy this expecting otherwise.

Who should buy it

If you fly P3D v4/v5 or FSX today and just want busy skies, buy AIG instead — it is free. Not "consider". The whole room has moved: the Orbx forums in July 2020, AVSIM in July 2024, every comparison thread since. AIG is more work to set up and its own flightplans are updated roughly annually — its 2026 roadmap admits some are older than that — but it is maintained, it covers about 950 airlines, and you can delete an airline the week it goes bust. Against that, €29.90 for a 2015 snapshot is not a competitive offer.

If you specifically want general aviation and military traffic in one install, MyTraffic is still the only thing that does it, and it may be worth your €29.90. This is the honest exception. AIG is an airline project; its GA and military coverage is thin and hunting down local GA plans is a hobby in itself. If your flying is Cessnas out of small fields and you want the circuit to be busy, nothing else in the FSX/P3D world hands you that in one download. Go in knowing you are buying scenery, not a timetable.

If you like historical simulation, this is a genuinely rare object. Schedules back to the early jet age, switchable from a menu, in editable text. There is nothing else like it at any price for these simulators.

If you are new to FSX or P3D, do not buy this. Read the one-star reviews first, all twelve of them, then read the five-star ones and notice that even they open with "although it is a bit of a process to get it to work." There is no installer that does it for you, no manual that is fully correct, no forum to ask on and nobody to email. That is not a hazing ritual worth going through for AI traffic in 2026.

If you fly nothing but detailed add-on airports, do not buy this either. You will spend your first evening deleting BR2 files to stop MyTraffic's own airport layouts from wrecking the sceneries you already paid for, and what you get back is aircraft on routes that ended a decade ago. One German commenter reached exactly that conclusion in 2015, before any of the schedules had even gone stale.

Where it stands today

There is a version of this review that treats MyTraffic 6 as a scandal — an abandoned product sold at full price, eleven years after its last patch, with no warning on the listing. Some of that is fair. simMarket knows the developer has not posted since 2017, because simMarket's own parent switched off the forum where he stopped posting, and the requirements line on the product page still advertises Prepar3D v2.5 as the ceiling. A buyer deserves to be told, on the page, before paying.

But abandonment is not what makes MyTraffic 6 unbuyable in 2026, because half its competition is abandoned too. Ultimate Traffic Live is on sale with its developer gone and official support withdrawn. World of AI is freeware whose own website stopped answering in early 2025, and a survey of AI traffic options published on 5 August 2026 warns readers to treat its routes and liveries as period pieces rather than current operations. This whole corner of the hobby is a museum, and the museum is not badly kept.

What makes MyTraffic 6 hard to recommend is narrower and more specific. It is the one product in that museum still charging a 2015 price for a 2015 world while a maintained free alternative sits next to it. Renk's last public plan was the right one — refresh the liveries and leave the schedules alone, because paint is what you notice from the cockpit window. He could not do it. Nobody was licensed to do it for him, though a customer publicly begged him to hand it to someone in June 2017. The product has been waiting for that paint update for nine years.

Score it as it stands. The score is low because the price is not, and because a €29.90 purchase in 2026 buys you an apron full of Alitalia at an airport Alitalia left in October 2021. If it were €9.90, or if the listing said plainly what it is, this would read differently.