Polish Airports Vol.1 X: two versions on sale, neither of them still being updated

On 5 April 2020 this package cost nothing. simMarket were running a promotion called "1 Giveaway 1 Day" through the first lockdown spring, and Drzewiecki Design put Polish Airports vol.1 into it — the FSX/P3D edition and the X-Plane edition both. A customer called Peter took the free copy, hit a SODE problem at Gdansk, went to the developer's forum, found an experimental VGDS file that fixed it, and left a five-star review the same afternoon. It opens: "What a great deal such a nice airport for free (even 4!)".

That review is still the newest thing on the product page. Six years later it sits at the top of a list of six, and nothing has been added under it.

The package is currently number 42 on simMarket's all-time bestseller list, which is a startling place to find four regional Polish airports built for a simulator most of the hobby left behind. A free day plainly helps a unit count — that is what bestseller lists measure — and this is the only Drzewiecki giveaway the record shows. What the free day did not do is move the score. Exactly one of the six ratings on the page comes from it, and the page's headline "5 out of 5" was already arithmetically generous before Peter arrived: five five-star ratings and one three-star average out at 4.67, not 5.0.

So the interesting question about Polish Airports vol.1 is not whether it is good. Four independent buyers, one video reviewer who has stood in several of the real terminals, and every release write-up since 2016 agree that it is. The interesting question is what you are being sold in August 2026, because simMarket has two editions of it on the shelf at once, the newer one has not been touched since July 2020, and in the intervening six years Drzewiecki have quietly rebuilt every single airport in the box as a separate full-price product for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

We read 24 public sources for this review: four simMarket listings for the package itself and its siblings, four more for the MSFS rebuilds, two Orbx pages, the FlightSim.com store record, two AVSIM threads, one Microsoft Flight Simulator forum thread, six news and review articles from FSElite, FSNews, simFlight and Threshold, a video review, and the 2012 announcement of the original. Reddit is structurally unavailable in this environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; on a product with this thin a forum record, that absence is felt more than usual.

What you are actually buying

Four Polish commercial airports and two small fields alongside them: EPGD Gdansk Lech Walesa, EPKT Katowice, EPRZ Rzeszow-Jasionka with the neighbouring aeroclub strip EPRJ, and EPLB Lublin with the old PZL-Swidnik grass field EPSW. Version 5 adds the cities of Rzeszow and Lublin with orthophoto, landmarks and autogen; version 4 only had Rzeszow. Worth knowing if you are buying on the strength of the series name: the original 2012 release covered three airports, not four. Lublin was added later, and the bundle has grown rather than shrunk.

The word "bundle" does a lot of work in this product's marketing, so be clear about the fidelity split. All four commercial airports are full custom sceneries with modelled terminals, SODE jetways, hangar doors, VGDS, 3D people, ground vehicles and optional static aircraft. EPRJ and EPSW are not — they are small companion fields, a lit asphalt strip and a grass strip with hangars, thrown in because they sit inside the same scenery area. Four airports you would actually plan a flight to; six ICAO codes.

Here is the shelf as it stands. All prices are simMarket's, shown at 0% VAT for an unresolved session — simMarket's terms say displayed prices include the applicable value added tax, so what you pay depends on where you are.

Edition	Price	On sale since	Size	Installs into
POLISH AIRPORTS VOL1 X (V4) FSX P3D	EUR 24.39	29 August 2016	1.55 GB	FSX, FSX:SE, FSW, P3D v1–v4
POLISH AIRPORTS VOL1 X (V5) FSX P3D	EUR 28.46	1 May 2020	2.04 GB	FSX, FSX:SE, P3D v1–v5
POLISH AIRPORTS VOL1 XP (V3)	EUR 28.46	29 June 2020	2.57 GB	X-Plane 11

A FS2004 edition exists too. Note what the simulator column actually says, because no store list we were given got it right: this is not a P3Dv5-only product and never was. The 2016 edition still installs into FSX and into Dovetail's Flight Sim World, a platform that was shut down in May 2018. The 2020 edition dropped FSW and added P3D v5. Neither supports P3D v6.

The older, cheaper version is not the sensible buy, and nothing on either page tells you so. Four euros and seven cents separates them. For that you get four extra years of development — Gdansk's terminal remodelled with interiors and its railway line finally built, Katowice's Terminal B reconstructed, Rzeszow's orthoscenery updated with SODE VGDS, Lublin's autogen and mesh fixed — plus P3D v5 support. The V4 page is visibly unmaintained: its own compatibility paragraph opens "Polish Airports vol.3 X is compatible with all Drzewiecki Design products", which is the wrong volume entirely, copied across and never corrected.

There is no cheaper store, and no meaningful basis on which to compare, because for FSX and P3D there is no second store. FlightSim.com's shop still has a record of v5.1, added 7 May 2020 and updated 8 July 2020, at 32.00 US dollars marked down to 22.40 — but it reads "Not for Sale", and FlightSim.com itself is currently offline for a rebuild. Contrail lists Drzewiecki's MSFS titles only. Orbx sells the X-Plane 11 volumes, at AU$41.99 for this one, and not the FSX/P3D package. Drzewiecki have no shop of their own. simMarket is it.

Upgrades inside the line are generous and always have been: EUR 10.00 to move to V4 from any earlier Polish Airports vol.1, EUR 17.10 to move to V5, or EUR 25.00 if you happen to own Chicago Airports X. If you took the free copy in April 2020, that EUR 17.10 is the best deal in this review.

What the community consistently praises

Performance, first, last and in between. It is the one thing every independent voice says, across four years and two editions. Marcin in August 2016: his PC "is not a demon of performance" but handles the whole package well. Ken in June 2019: they work "beautifully in P3D v.4 with no impact to framerates". Marcin again in May 2020 on the new build: "Firstly vety solid fps". Oliver in December 2020: "The performance is great, I noticed no negative impact on my sim." Even the package's harshest reviewer does not raise frame rates. For a four-airport scenery with orthophoto cities attached, that is the finding that matters most.

Second, longevity. This is a product line that has been maintained since 2012 through at least six paid or free revisions, and buyers noticed. tedias, July 2020: "I love the fact that for so many years this package is being kept up-to-date. There are not many countries with all airports having commercial high-quality sceneries and Poland is definitely on of them." The free v4.6 update of August 2019 gave every airport dynamic lighting, native P3Dv4 ground polygons and weather-dependent airport lighting at no cost to existing owners, which was more than most developers were doing at the time.

Third, the demo policy, which deserves more credit than it gets. Drzewiecki publish a free, simplified but positionally identical version of every airport in the package. It means a VATSIM or IVAO session does not fall apart because half the pilots own the payware and half do not. Very few payware airport developers do this.

Fourth, the detail that arrived with version 5 and genuinely changed the feel of the place. Piotr, 9 May 2020: "there are new animations, moving trains and railway stations, many new buildings, more autogen, 3d people, static planes, city of Lublin and Rzeszow with many landmarks". That railway matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to it.

Finally, real-world familiarity. Drawyah's April 2017 video review of v4 is short — four minutes and fifty-six seconds, and it has been watched fewer than 1,800 times — but the reviewer states plainly that he has been to several of these airports and is enthusiastic about the results. On a product this lightly covered, a reviewer who knows the real terminals is worth more than a dozen fly-bys.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The record here is small enough that every complaint can be named, dated and given a status. That is unusual, and it is a finding in itself: a top-50 all-time seller with six store reviews and no long argument thread anywhere we could find.

Ground textures around the airports. Still open. Rafal, 30 August 2016, was blunt: the photoreal ground around EPKT and EPGD is "very low quality, taken directly from a source without even good photoshop cleaning (cars on the roads, parking lots, shadows, etc)". Bradley, 29 June 2020, on the newer build, independently reached the same place from a different angle: the photo base is "alittle washed out and not very well matched to ORBX OpenLC Europe", and there is no exclude to let ORBX's 3D night road lighting through, so at night you get a glowing photo texture trying to stand in for street lights. Two buyers, four years apart, same area of the product.

The EPKT terminal. Mitigated. Rafal's 2016 verdict — textures that "still look at most FS2004-like" — was answered in the 2020 build, which reconstructed Terminal B, added the VIP entrance, the highway, a hotel and car parks. That is exactly the right response, four years late.

Night lighting configuration. Still open on the record. Bradley's is the most specific bug report anyone has filed publicly, and it is a strange one. The installer offers an option to turn runway lights off; he found it turns them off in daylight and at night, so "if you are flying to any of these airports after sunsut look luck locating the runway". No public fix or clarification has appeared since 29 June 2020, and there has been no build since 8 July 2020 in which to issue one.

No configuration tool. Still open. Both Rafal in 2016 and Bradley in 2020 asked for a settings panel; the answer is still to re-run the entire installer and pick different options, with, as Bradley notes, no comparison screenshots to tell you what you are choosing between.

GSX and AFCAD. Unresolved, and still being claimed. Rafal reported "serious AFCAD/GSX problems" in 2016 and said users could work around them themselves. The product page has claimed GSX compatibility since. We found nothing public confirming a fix.

One thing that was fixed, and it is worth saying so. Rafal's 2016 review complained that the PKM railway running in front of Gdansk terminal — the most conspicuous object outside the aerodrome — was absent, "not even static". Version 5 built it, with animated trains and stations. It took four years, but the developer read the complaint and answered it. The image at the top of this review is Drzewiecki's own promotional shot of exactly that railway.

Platform life. Still open, and now structural. The package supports P3D up to v5. P3D v6 has been out since 2023. There is no v6 support, no announcement of any, and no FSX/P3D build since 8 July 2020. We could not read Drzewiecki's own support forum to see what has been said there — it sits behind a Cloudflare bot check that defeated WebFetch, curl and the browser tools alike, so we are not going to pretend otherwise, and we will not quote search snippets of pages we could not open.

Performance and stability

There is almost nothing to report, which is the compliment. Across six store reviews spanning 2016 to 2020, one video review and every release write-up, no one reports a crash, a stutter or a frame rate problem attributable to this package. Given that it drops four custom airports and two orthophoto cities into simulators as old as FSX, that is a real engineering achievement and the single clearest reason the thing sold as well as it did.

Assign the blame accurately on the other side of this, too. Drzewiecki do have a performance reputation problem, and it is loud — a February 2022 thread on the official Microsoft Flight Simulator forum, opened with a complaint of 12 fps on a high-end machine, ran to several pages of argument about their optimisation. But read what it is about: Chicago Midway, Chicago Landmarks, Moscow Sheremetyevo, Seattle. All MSFS, all much later, all far heavier. None of it is about the Polish package, and it would be dishonest to score this product on it.

The one genuine fragility is the SODE dependency. SimObject Display Engine is required at install time, and Peter's April 2020 note shows what happens when a SODE version and this scenery disagree: jetways and VGDS misbehave at Gdansk until you go and find a fix file. That fix lives on a developer forum that is currently very hard to reach.

Who should buy it

The P3D v4 or v5 pilot who flies in or out of Poland. Buy it, and buy version 5, not version 4. Four custom airports covering the second, fourth and seventh busiest fields in the country for EUR 28.46 is the best value-per-airport on the platform, and there is no competitor for these ICAO codes.

The FSX or FSX:SE holdout. Buy it. Very little of this quality still installs into FSX at all, and this does, at whichever version you pick.

The X-Plane 11 flyer. Buy the XP edition instead, from simMarket at EUR 28.46 or Orbx at AU$41.99. Same four airports, SAM jetways and marshallers, PBR materials. Do not buy the X edition by mistake — the SKU names differ by two characters.

Anyone who took the free copy on 5 April 2020. The EUR 17.10 upgrade to version 5 is the single best-value transaction in this review. Six years of work for less than the difference between the two shelf prices would suggest.

The P3D v6 user. Do not buy this. It is not supported, the last build predates P3D v6 by three years, and nothing in the public record suggests support is coming. Buying on the assumption that a v5 product will behave in v6 is how people end up with a scenery library they cannot troubleshoot.

The MSFS 2020 or 2024 flyer. Do not buy this either — and be aware of what buying the modern equivalents costs. All four airports now exist as standalone Drzewiecki products for MSFS: Lublin from 19 September 2021 at EUR 9.00, Rzeszow from 25 June 2022 at EUR 15.00, Gdansk from 5 July 2023 at EUR 18.00, and Katowice from 21 December 2025 at EUR 21.00. That is EUR 63.00 for the same four airports, against EUR 28.46 for the bundle. They are better — Threshold's review of the MSFS Gdansk calls it "a step up from their Prepar3d version in every regard" — but you are paying 2.2 times the price and buying them one at a time.

Where it stands today

Drzewiecki Design are not gone, dormant or in trouble. They are one of the most productive scenery houses working: Katowice for MSFS 2020 and 2024 landed in December 2025, KBFM Mobile International in Alabama arrived in 2026, and Western Sydney International — their first Australian project — is announced and previewed. The company is thriving. It has simply moved, completely, to a different simulator.

What that leaves behind is a good product in a strange position. Polish Airports vol.1 X is still on sale in two editions, one of which has been obsolete since 2020 and neither of which has been rebuilt since. Its four airports have all been reconstructed for MSFS as separate purchases, and the courtesy extended to the customers who paid for the originals is close to nothing: of the four MSFS rebuilds, exactly one — Rzeszow — offers owners of any Polish Airports vol.1 edition a discount, and that discount is EUR 1.50. Gdansk, Katowice and Lublin offer nothing at all. Inside the old line the upgrade pricing was always generous. Across the platform gap it evaporated.

None of which changes what happens when a P3D v5 user with EUR 28.46 installs this. Four Polish airports appear, they look right, the jetways move, the trains run past Gdansk terminal, and the frame counter does not flinch. On the platform it was built for, six years of silence has not made it worse. It has only made it finished.