RealTurb Greek Airports: fifty airports of wind for €5, if you can get it installed

Two people bought the same file. One says his aircraft gets thrown around on the Skiathos approach in a way P3D has never managed on its own. The other installed it, flew for a month, felt precisely nothing, and concluded he had been sold air. On AVSIM in January 2024 the second man finally worked out why: he had copied the P3D v5 patch into his simulator without ever running the P3D v4 installer underneath it, so the add-on had been sitting there doing nothing at all. "Unbelievable that they don't make this clear anywhere in an installation guide!" he wrote on 18 January, and he is right.

That is RealTurb Greek Airports in one paragraph. It is not scenery. Nothing it does is visible. It is a 4.15MB file — a small executable and a hand-built dataset — that hooks P3D through SimConnect, reads the wind, looks up what terrain sits upwind of each of fifty Greek airfields, and rewrites how that wind arrives at your aeroplane. Wind off the open Aegean stays smooth. The same wind spilling over the ridge behind Skiathos does not.

Greece is the right place to do this, and RealTurb picked it first for a reason. The meltemi blows down the Aegean from May to September, funnels between islands, tumbles off headlands, and produces the crosswind approaches that make Skiathos and Mykonos YouTube staples. In the default simulator all of that arrives as the same undifferentiated wobble whether you are landing at Santorini or at Stansted. That is the gap this add-on exists to fill, and as far as the record goes, nothing else in Prepar3D fills it — a user comparing weather engines on AVSIM in January 2025 put RealTurb's terrain setting to maximum and everything else to minimum specifically "because neither MSFS nor ASFS does have that".

The catch is that the record is thin, old, and lopsided. Four customer reviews on simMarket, all five stars, all posted between 22 February and 4 March 2019 — the fortnight after release, and nothing in the seven and a half years since. One written review, from Flight Sim Central, whose author disclosed both that the products were given to him free and that the demonstration videos in the piece are the developer's own. Reddit, which would normally give the sentiment-at-a-glance check, is unavailable in this environment, so treat its absence as expected rather than as evidence. What is left is the P3D forums, where RealTurb is argued about constantly but the Greek pack specifically almost never.

We read 23 sources for this review: the simMarket listing, five sibling product pages and the developer's full catalogue, an archived 2019 snapshot of the same listing, seven Prepar3D and MSFS forum threads on AVSIM running from July 2019 to July 2026, a PMDG support thread, the developer's own videos and Facebook page, the one independent written review, and FSElite's coverage of the developer.

What you are actually buying

A single package, one price, no variants. Here is the family it sits in, all of it sold through simMarket, all prices as listed on 21 August 2026 with an unresolved VAT session:

Product	Price	What it is
RealTurb Greek Airports P3D4-5	€5.00	50 Greek airfields. The subject of this review
RealTurb Summer Destinations P3DV4/V5	€5.00	14 European holiday fields — Madeira, Gibraltar, Split, Tivat
RealTurb Europe P3DV4/V5	€19.99	The whole continent. Includes both of the above
RealTurb Africa and Antarctica P3D4-5	€0.00	Free, full-featured, no time limit. The way to test the engine
RealTurb CAT Areas Global P3D4-5	€11.99	High-altitude clear-air turbulence. A separate layer

There is no developer store to price-check against. M. A. RealTurb has no website; the Facebook page's own "Information" field simply links to their simMarket search results, and the listing shows "Sold by M. A. REALTURB" — simMarket is the shop. So €5.00 is the price, and it is the only price.

It has not always been. An archived snapshot of this listing from 21 August 2019 shows it at €14.99, discounted 25 per cent to €11.24, which is where Flight Sim Central's "EUR 17.99 incl. VAT" came from in March 2019. It was still €14.99 in January 2022. By 2 July 2022 it had fallen to €5.00 and has not moved since — a two-thirds cut that lands in the same few months the developer was announcing his first MSFS products. Draw your own conclusion about which platform got the attention.

The trap in that table is the Europe pack. The Greek listing says it plainly: these airports are also in RealTurb Europe. The Europe readme goes further and requires you to uninstall Greek Airports and Summer Destinations before installing it. So €5.00 buys Greece, but if you later decide you want France and Norway too, you pay €19.99 on top and throw the first purchase away. There is no upgrade path between them. If you fly Europe generally, buy Europe. Greek Airports is for someone whose flying is genuinely Greek.

Which airports, exactly

Fifty, listed by ICAO on the store page, and the coverage is not token. Every active Greek civil airport is there — Athens (LGAV), Thessaloniki (LGTS), Heraklion (LGIR), Rhodes (LGRP), Corfu (LGKR), Chania (LGSA), Kos (LGKO), Santorini (LGSR), Mykonos (LGMK), Skiathos (LGSK), Zakynthos (LGZA), Kefalonia (LGKF), Samos (LGSM), Mytilene (LGMT), Preveza (LGPZ), Kalamata (LGKL) — down to Kastellorizo (LGKJ), Kasos (LGKS), Astypalaia (LGPL) and Ikaria (LGIK). A dozen military and secondary fields come along uncounted: Tanagra, Andravida, Elefsis, Tatoi, Larisa, Megara, Agrinio. For a five-euro file, the coverage claim is the part that holds up cleanest.

What it needs to work

P3D v4.4 or later, or v5.0 or later, with SimConnect. The developer notes it should run on any v4.0+ build. There is no FSX version, no P3D v6 statement anywhere on the page or in the forums, and no MSFS version of the Greek pack at all — the only Greek thing RealTurb has released for MSFS is Ioannina, and that is airport scenery, not turbulence.

And then there is ActiveSky, which the requirements box calls "optional however strongly recommended". Read the feature list ten lines higher on the same page and four of the six advertised effects — wind shifting, wind shear, thermals, ridge lift — carry the parenthetical "(Requires Activesky for Prepar3D v4.4+)". Without ActiveSky you get turbulence and speed fluctuation. That is not nothing, but it is not what the box says either.

What the community consistently praises

The terrain relationship is real and it is the reason to buy. This is the finding that repeats furthest across the record and from the most independent directions. Flight Sim Central's Tom Bews, reviewing on 29 March 2019, described being able to feel the difference between the Rock at Gibraltar bending the wind and the terrain funnelling it at Bilbao — two approaches that behave identically in stock P3D. An AVSIM poster in July 2025 put it more flatly: wind "influenced by surrounding terrain, which is a big improvement". Another, in January 2024, found the proof by flying into Santiago twice — severe mountain-wave turbulence with the wind perpendicular to the Andes, nothing at all the next day with four knots down the runway. That is the engine behaving correctly, not failing.

It costs nothing to run. Every source that addresses performance says the same thing and none contradicts it. Bews measured no FPS drop at all, "maybe a percent or two more CPU usage", and awarded performance five stars. In seven years of forum threads nobody has posted a frame-rate complaint about RealTurb. For an add-on that ships as 4.15MB of data and a SimConnect client, this is exactly what you would expect, and it is worth stating because it is the rare marketing claim that survives contact.

Once it is in, you never touch it again. The store page's "no user input/setup required" is the feature owners actually name back. "You just install and forget, no configuring" (AVSIM, 18 July 2019). "It's more one of those apps that sit in the background and do their job without issue" (AVSIM, 5 July 2025). There are no sliders, no profiles, no per-airport tuning. Whether that is a virtue or the source of half the complaints below depends entirely on your temperament.

The developer was responsive, when he was here. One of the four 2019 store reviewers asked for an additional airport and reported it added in an update. Another was told to try the free Africa and Antarctica package first — a genuinely fully featured free release, no time limit, available since 8 June 2019 — and the community has been repeating that advice ever since, most recently in July 2025. A €5 purchase with a free trial of the identical engine is an honest way to sell something this hard to demonstrate.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Installation, and it is the big one. Status: still open. The packages ship as a P3D v4 executable plus a stack of update zips that must be applied over it in order, with a folder rename and a manual .dll deletion in the middle. Install only the v5 patch — which is the obvious thing to do if you run v5 — and the add-on activates in the simulator, appears in your add-ons list, and does absolutely nothing. Two AVSIM regulars independently made this exact mistake and each concluded for months that the product was a dud. The fix was posted by a customer, not by the developer, on 18 January 2024, and it is a customer's transcription of a readme that most buyers evidently never open. One of the pair reported errors during the installer run itself on the free Africa package and pressed on regardless. There has been no installer improvement since.

"I don't notice much difference." Status: partly expectations, partly real. This complaint spans the whole record — July 2019, May 2019, January 2024, July 2025. Some of it is the install problem above. Some of it is legitimate: the effects only fire when the actual weather has wind doing something interesting relative to terrain, so if you fly on a calm day into a coastal field you will correctly feel nothing, and the product gives you no indication that it is running. But some of it is unresolved. A July 2025 poster who owns it in both P3D 4.5 and 5.3 says "I used it but I didn't notice much difference", and the answer he received was not a diagnostic but an anecdote.

And, from the other direction, that it is overdone. Status: still open. On 25 May 2019 an AVSIM poster flying into Melbourne reported severe turbulence continuously from 6,000 feet with the wind at 14 gusting 24 straight down the runway, no turbulence mentioned in the METAR or TAF and unremarkable winds aloft. That is the mirror image of the previous complaint and nobody has ever reconciled the two in public. Nobody, in seven years, has published a comparison of RealTurb's output against real pilot reports or PIREPs for any airport, Greek or otherwise. The realism claim is plausible, widely believed, and formally unverified.

PMDG aircraft rock on the ground. Status: still open, never publicly fixed. Reported on the PMDG forums on 12 January 2020: with a 17-knot tailwind, engines running, a parked or taxiing 747 sits there compressing and decompressing its struts continuously. The reporter could not reproduce it on default aircraft or the Maddog; a second user confirmed the scenario. The suggested fix — a groundspeed threshold below which the effect stops — was passed to the developer and nothing came of it publicly. Note the aggravating detail from the same thread: the reporter states that ActiveSky's own turbulence sliders have no influence on RealTurb, so you cannot dial this out from the weather engine.

Nothing has shipped for this product since 2019. The store page still describes "v1.6+" thermals as the newest feature. Its sibling Europe pack reached v2.0. There is no statement anywhere about P3D v6, which has been out since 2023. A July 2025 poster warns to "be careful on which version you install because is incompatible with ASP3D" — a claim we could not corroborate anywhere else, and one that sits awkwardly against a store page which names ActiveSky for P3D as the recommended companion, so treat it as a caution to test rather than a finding.

The record itself is a problem. Four store reviews, all inside a fortnight in 2019. One independent written review, disclosed as a free copy and illustrated with the developer's videos. The developer's own demonstration of this product — a two-minute bumpy approach into Skiathos — has 1,000 views in seven years, and the entire public demonstration of the thermals and ridge-lift feature is a thirteen-second clip. A 5.0 average from four people in one fortnight is not the same statement as a 5.0 from four hundred people over seven years, and it should not be read as one.

Performance and stability

There is no performance story here, which is the story. 4.15MB on disk, a SimConnect client reading wind and terrain, and no rendering work of any kind. Bews found no measurable frame-rate cost in March 2019 across FSLabs, TFDi and PMDG airframes with add-on scenery at the destination airports; no forum poster in seven years has contradicted him. If your P3D installation is struggling, this is not why.

Stability is likewise uneventful — no crash reports, no CTD threads, nothing in any of the seven forum threads we read. The two failure modes are both behavioural rather than technical: the add-on silently doing nothing because it was installed wrong, and the PMDG ground-rocking bug from January 2020.

One integration note worth having before you buy. The developer stated publicly on AVSIM on 28 May 2019 that he had to thank "the ActiveSky guys for helping/allowing RealTurb communication with ActiveSky", adding that without their help "RealTurb effects would have been very much limited". That is a candid admission that this is a companion to a weather engine rather than a standalone product. In practice owners run it alongside ActiveSky with the weather engine's own turbulence turned down — FSLabs' recommended figures, quoted on AVSIM in January 2024, are 20 per cent cloud turbulence, 20 per cent turbulence effect scale, 20 per cent max wind turbulence, enhanced turbulence disabled. Owners also report it coexisting happily with ChasePlane, EZdok and A2A AccuFeel, though AccuFeel's own turbulence slider needs pulling back to 20–30 per cent to stop the two stacking.

Who should buy it

The simmer who actually flies Greece in P3D v4 or v5 — buy it. Fifty airfields, five euros, no performance cost, and the one effect the platform genuinely lacks. If your hobby is A320s into Skiathos and Mykonos in July, this is the cheapest meaningful realism upgrade available to you. Budget an evening for the install and read the readme first.

The simmer who flies all over Europe — skip this and buy RealTurb Europe. €19.99 covers the continent, includes every airport in this package, and spares you buying the same file twice. Greek Airports is a regional entry point, not a component.

The curious — install the free Africa and Antarctica package first. It is the same engine, fully featured, no time limit, and it will tell you inside two flights whether this class of add-on does anything for you. The community has been giving this advice since 2019 and it is still the right advice.

The P3D v6 user, and anyone on FSX or MSFS — do not buy it. There is no FSX build, no MSFS build, and not one word from the developer about v6 in three years. The only Greek product RealTurb has shipped for MSFS is Ioannina airport scenery, which is a different thing entirely.

The simmer who wants a product he can configure and see working — do not buy it. This one has no interface, no indicator, no logging and no sliders. If you need feedback that your money is doing something, its silence will drive you mad, and the forums are full of people it has already driven mad.

The tubeliner pilot who flies PMDG exclusively — hold off. The January 2020 ground-rocking bug was never publicly fixed, it cannot be tuned out from ActiveSky, and nobody has confirmed it gone. Test on the free package at a windy field before spending anything.

Where it stands today

M. A. RealTurb is not dead, which is worth saying plainly because it would be easy to assume otherwise from a product page that has not changed since 2019. The Facebook page — the developer's only public channel, since there is no website and no support forum — carries a post dated 22 April announcing version 2.1.0 of RealTurb CAT Areas Global for MSFS, and the MSFS product's most recent customer review on simMarket is dated 11 July 2026. He is answering customers. He is shipping. He simply is not shipping anything for Prepar3D, and has not since Ioannina airport in December 2021.

For a P3D add-on in 2026 that is close to the natural end state. Prepar3D itself is a legacy platform now, the Greek pack does what it did on release day, and at €5.00 — a third of its 2019 price — the arithmetic is easy in a way it was not at €14.99. What has not changed is the evidence. Seven and a half years on, this product's realism claim still rests on four store reviews from one fortnight, one comped written review illustrated with the developer's own footage, and a scatter of forum posts by people who mostly could not agree on whether it was doing anything. That is not an accusation. It is a description of what a €5 utility with no visible output and no user interface tends to accumulate, and it is why the score below is lower than the enthusiasm of the people who own it.

Buy it if you fly Greece, install it properly, fly it in a meltemi, and judge for yourself. That last part is not a cop-out — with this product it is genuinely the only test that exists.