NY Airports v2 X: the LaGuardia that never existed, and the JFK nobody replaced

On 20 July 2017, the day after this package went on sale, a customer on AVSIM asked the developer a very simple question about the marketing shots: the first screenshot has the Freedom Tower in it — is Manhattan in the box? Drzewiecki Design answered in full and without flinching. No. The autogen is ORBX Global, the sky and clouds are REX 4, the grass is a separate Drzewiecki add-on, the skyline is their New York City X, and the whole thing went through Corel Photo Paint afterwards for resizing and sharpening.

That is an unusually honest answer, and it is a useful way into this product, because almost everything about NY Airports v2 X is exactly what it says on the tin and nothing more. Three airports. Nineteen euro. Runs well. No skyline, no city, no charts in the manual.

The complication is LaGuardia. In July 2017 the real LGA was a building site, and rather than model a building site or model the terminal that was being knocked down, Drzewiecki modelled the airport as the Port Authority's own visualisation of 12 July 2016 said it would eventually look. Nine years later the rebuild is finished, it cost eight billion dollars, and it does not look like that drawing. So a buyer in 2026 gets a LaGuardia that has never existed at any point in history — not the one that was demolished, not the one that replaced it.

And JFK is the other way round. It was the most current Kennedy anyone could buy in 2017, it was still the most current Kennedy for Prepar3D in 2021, and it is still the most current Kennedy for Prepar3D today — not because it has been kept up, but because nobody has built another one and the airport itself has been comprehensively rebuilt around it in the meantime.

We read 25 sources for this: the developer's own site and news archive, four store listings and their changelogs, a full written review, five AVSIM threads spanning 2017 to July 2026, thirteen store ratings with dates, two videos, and the competitors. Reddit is blocked in our environment and always is, so the sentiment-at-a-glance layer that usually corroborates forum threads is absent here — treat the forum record below as doing that job alone.

What you are actually buying

One installer, three airports, and a menu that lets you leave any of them out.

Product	NY Airports v2 X: KJFK, KLGA, KTEB
Developer	Drzewiecki Design
Released	19 July 2017
Current version	2.6, dated 3 August 2020
Price	€19.00 at simMarket, US$23.99 at Just Flight, €19.00 ex-VAT at Aerosoft
Upgrade price	€14.25 at simMarket for owners of New York Airports X v1 or any of its single-airport Extracts
Simulators	FSX, FSX:SE, Flight Sim World, P3D v1, v2, v3, v4, v5
Requires	SimObject Display Engine (SODE)
Download	647.93 MB

Read that price carefully. simMarket's terms say displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", and an unresolved browsing session resolves to 0%, so €19.00 is the tax-excluded figure. It is also, to the cent, the price at launch: FSElite reported €19.00 on release day, while the German review at simFlight.DE quoted €22.61 and buyers on AVSIM were saying "€23" — that is the same €19.00 with 19% German VAT on it. Nine years on sale, no price change, and no store is cheaper than another in any way we could establish. Just Flight's US$23.99 is the same money in a different currency.

This is half a bundle. Drzewiecki split six New York airports into two packages sold separately, and the other one — NY Airports v2 X: KEWR, KLDJ, KCDW — carries Newark, Linden and Caldwell for another €19.00. If you want Newark, and most airline simmers do, the New York bill is €38.00 and not €19.00. The product page says so plainly; the store listing does too. It is worth restating anyway, because "NY Airports" sounds like it covers New York and it covers three of the six airports Drzewiecki made.

What it does not include is any of the city. New York City X is a third product. The heliports live there; the airports live here; the two are built to work together and neither contains the other.

The installer is the underrated feature. You can run it again at any time and re-pick your options, including dropping any of the three airports entirely — so if you already own ImagineSim's LaGuardia or FSDreamTeam's Kennedy, you can install only the parts you want and keep the rest of your library intact. Drzewiecki confirmed exactly this in the release thread, with a screenshot of the menu, within two hours of the first person asking.

There is also a free demo covering all six airports at reduced detail, published so that VATSIM and IVAO pilots who have not bought the package still see the same layout as the ones who have. It is not a giveaway of the payware — we checked, and the only Drzewiecki title that has genuinely been handed out free through simMarket was Polish Airports vol.1, for one day in April 2020. This product's simMarket rank is a sales rank, earned at €19.00.

What the community consistently praises

It is fast, and that is not a marketing line. The New York area is the classic frame-rate graveyard of legacy flight simulation — three major airports, one dense city, water everywhere — and v1 of this scenery was, in the words of one AVSIM regular, "among the worse optimised scenery I've ever come across". Thomas Hempel tested v2 for simFlight.DE on a 4.5 GHz i5-4670K and a GTX 970, sat a PMDG 737 on JFK's 04L with 194 active AI aircraft, and got 20 fps; dropping to 60 AI took it to 25. Nine years of store reviews say the same thing in shorter words — "little to no impact on FPS" (Kristof, December 2020), "nice static aircraft and performance FPS" (wesam, May 2025). The marketing claims a 300% improvement over v1 and nobody has ever seriously disputed it.

Ground clutter is the thing people actually notice. Tugs, baggage carts, airstairs, 3D people, animated vehicles, static aircraft with their doors open at Teterboro. Hempel found the density conspicuous even where he thought it was misjudged — he could not work out why a performance-first scenery placed hundreds of static taxis while economising on textures, but he agreed they were there. Every positive store review names the ground services.

Teterboro is the quiet standout. It gets the least marketing attention and the warmest write-ups. Hempel found no faults at all with it: good colour work, good building detail, the right business-aviation atmosphere. In a package where JFK is a compromise and LGA is a guess, KTEB is simply a good little airport, and it is the one airport of the three that no other developer has ever done properly for these simulators.

JFK's layout was genuinely ahead of its rivals — in 2017. The developer's claim at release was that theirs had the after-construction layout for taxiways F and H, and buyers who knew the field backed it. Three years later, in an October 2020 AVSIM thread titled "Best JFK airport scenery for V5", the first answer was still "DD's. FSDT's is way too old now, they still have the old Pan Am terminal 3." That thread ran to 45 replies and 16,900 views and never produced a better answer.

What keeps coming up as a problem

SODE and GSX jetways. Status: still open, nine years. This is the single most durable complaint in the record, and it appears in every era. Day one, anden145 on AVSIM could not get a jetway to appear at all and took it to the SODE and FSDreamTeam forums. Two months later a simMarket buyer called luca wrote that the SODE jetways were "next to impossible to get to work". Hempel saw jetways floating detached from the terminal at distance and confirmed it was not his install — the same defect is visible in Drzewiecki's own product screenshots. In November 2021, four years after release, an AVSIM user reinstalled to fix a taxiway problem and got duplicated jetways for his trouble; another replied that he had simply given up and now positions his camera on the other side of the aircraft so he cannot see them. The workaround the community settled on is a third-party GSX profile published by iniBuilds, not anything from the developer.

Night lighting. Status: improved in v2.5–v2.6, still divisive. The original release had no dynamic lighting and did not claim any. What it did have was night textures tuned for HDR: turn HDR off and the airports go black. A buyer raised this on AVSIM in July 2017 and got told by the developer's forum to turn HDR on. A German customer left a two-star review in April 2019 describing JFK at night as a darkroom — apron floodlights lit but the apron beneath them pitch black, missing threshold strobe effects at JFK, the same flat monotone glow on every building, and GSX passengers who would need a torch to find the aircraft. Dynamic lighting arrived with v2.5 for P3D v5 and was extended to v4 and improved in v2.6, and the reviews after that point turn positive — "I love the new lighting" (tedias, July 2020), "love your dynamic lights of p3dv5" (Javier, June 2020). If you are on FSX or P3D v3, none of that reaches you.

Texture resolution. Status: never addressed. Hempel's core criticism in October 2017 was that the ground and building textures are soft, blotchy and undersized, that the crisp taxiway markings sit on top of them looking painted on, and that with P3D v4's 64-bit memory the argument for low-resolution textures was already close to obsolete. A simMarket reviewer in January 2019 put it as "the buildings and terminals are nice, but I really don't like the ground textures and runway markings. They look too default." In March 2021 an AVSIM thread opened with the word "Shocking" and the phrase "awful textures". Nothing in any changelog after v2.3 touches textures.

Installation and duplicate-AFCAD breakage. Status: mostly resolved by the community, not the developer. Within six hours of release one buyer had P3D v4 crashing to desktop the moment a scenario loaded; the cause turned out to be the encoding of the add-on XML file, and the fix was for the customer to open it in Notepad++. Others hit AFCAD collisions with MyTraffic 6 and with FSDreamTeam's JFK. These are ordinary legacy-simulator problems and none of them is unique to this product, but the pattern — user diagnoses, user fixes, developer moves on — is consistent.

Aircraft falling through the bridge taxiways in P3D v5. Status: unresolved, workaround only. Reported on AVSIM in March 2021 alongside the performance complaint; the community answer was to set mesh resolution to 5m and hope. The most recent report in the file is dated 29 July 2026: a P3D v5 user with all the Drzewiecki New York airports installed finds KJFK alone missing its skidmarks and asphalt detail. Three weeks later it has no replies at all.

Performance and stability

The headline number is good and holds up. The stability picture is more mixed, and almost all of it comes down to the fact that the last patch is dated 3 August 2020.

Version 2.6 is the end of the line. The changelog is public at Just Flight and reads v2.1, v2.3, v2.4, v2.5, v2.6 — improved lighting textures, new JFK taxiways GG and EE, the demolished hangars removed, SODE 1.6.2 compatibility, P3D v5 compatibility, dynamic lighting extended to P3D v4. That is five updates in three years, which is a respectable record, and then nothing for six years.

Compatibility is where this gets awkward. Drzewiecki's own products index files this scenery under the heading "PREPAR3D V4 / V5 / V6". Every store that sells it — simMarket, Just Flight, Aerosoft — lists FSX through P3D v5 and stops. P3D v6 shipped in November 2022, more than two years after the last patch, and no Drzewiecki product on simMarket's catalogue carries a v6 badge; theirs all show P3D5. The developer's news archive records the P3D v4 compatibility sweep of 4 June 2017 and nothing comparable since. If you run P3D v6, treat this as untested and unsupported by anything except a category heading on a website.

Reports of it working in v5 outnumber reports of it breaking, comfortably. But the bridges bug, the missing 31L one user saw, the grey flood on a taxiway, the missing ground detail this July — those are the shape of an unmaintained scenery meeting simulator versions it was never tested against, and there is nobody left to file them with.

Who should buy it

Buy it if you fly airliners in P3D v4 or v5 and want to go to New York. There is no better Kennedy for these simulators and there is not going to be one. FSDreamTeam's KJFK dates from 2013 and is a half-remake of a 2009 scenery; its own developer said publicly in October 2020 that they had moved to Microsoft Flight Simulator and, in March 2023, that porting back was "just not worth the time/effort". Nineteen euro for JFK plus a spare LaGuardia plus a genuinely good Teterboro is a fair deal even in its frozen state.

Buy it if you fly business jets. This is the strongest case in the package. Teterboro is the busiest general-aviation field in the New York area, it is well made, it is accurate to the airport's character, and no one else has bothered. If you fly a Citation or a Global, you are buying KTEB and getting two airliner airports as change.

Buy the other half too, or neither, if Newark matters to you. The reviewers who liked this series liked Newark best of all six airports, and Newark is not in this box. Budget €38.00 or accept that you have bought the JFK/LGA/TEB half of New York.

Do not buy it for LaGuardia. This is the profile that should walk away. If LGA is the airport you fly, this is the wrong product: the model is a rendering of a 2016 masterplan, it does not match the terminal that opened in 2020 or the Delta terminal that followed, Hempel called it "ein Reinfall" — a flop — and found houses standing at the back of the terminal apron. ImagineSim's KLGA for P3D v4, released in February 2018, models the airport as it actually is. Buy that instead, and install this package with LaGuardia unticked.

Do not buy it if you are on P3D v6, MSFS or X-Plane 12. It has never been tested against P3D v6 and there is no version of it for the modern simulators. In Microsoft Flight Simulator, JFK is covered by iniBuilds and LaGuardia by MK Studios; in X-Plane 12, none of these three airports exists as a Drzewiecki product at all.

Where it stands today

The obvious question, given that we published a review of Drzewiecki's Chicago Airports XP that found it frozen at 2019 and being resold one airport at a time as separate full-price X-Plane 12 products, is whether the same thing is happening in New York. The honest answer is: partly, and not to this product.

Drzewiecki is in good health and shipping constantly. Their news archive lists KBFM Mobile for MSFS on 3 August 2026, KEWR Newark Liberty for X-Plane 12 on 20 February 2026, EPSC Szczecin in March, EPRA Radom in January. The piecemeal-rebuild pattern is real: Chicago Midway came back as a standalone MSFS product in December 2021 and again for X-Plane 12 in March 2025, and Newark came back for MSFS in December 2022 and for X-Plane 12 this February, at US$24 or €22.50 — more, alone, than the three-airport legacy bundle costs. But Newark is in the other New York package. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Teterboro have not been rebuilt, resold or superseded by anything Drzewiecki has released for any simulator. Nothing we published about Chicago is wrong; it just should not be read as a rule about the whole catalogue, and this bundle is the counter-example.

What has happened instead is quieter and, for a buyer, harder to argue with. Drzewiecki's last new Prepar3D product was RJAA Tokyo Narita on 18 October 2020. The last patch to this scenery was ten weeks before that. The studio did not abandon these three airports in favour of paid replacements — it left the platform, and took them with it.

So the record settles into an unusual shape. The scenery is dated, undersupported and carries a fictional LaGuardia. It also runs beautifully, costs nineteen euro, includes an airport nobody else has made, and is still the best Kennedy available for the simulator it was written for, nine years after release, because the market it served has emptied out around it. Both halves of that are true and the score sits where they meet.

Real JFK has moved a long way since 3 August 2020. Terminal 2 is gone, the ground it stood on is the site of the new Terminal One, whose first fourteen gates are due to open later this year; the old Terminal 1 comes down after that; Terminal 6 is rising on the old 6 and 7 site as part of a $19 billion programme. LaGuardia finished its own rebuild in 2022. Teterboro opened a new control tower in October 2024 and resurfaced Runway 6/24 the year before. None of that is in this scenery, none of it is coming, and for a great many Prepar3D pilots it will still be the JFK they fly into next weekend.