RJSA Aomori Airport: MFSG's 2024 badge is honest, and it costs you twelve euros twice

Aomori clears its runway with a team called White Impulse. Thirty-eight vehicles, 669 centimetres of snow in an average year, and a published target of about forty minutes to sweep runway, taxiways and apron. It is one of the more genuinely interesting winter airports in the world, and until last week the only way to fly into a hand-built version of it in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was to buy a scenery labelled MSFS 2020 and hope.

On 16 August 2026 that changed, sort of. MFSG published RJSA AOMORI AIRPORT MSFS24 on simMarket — €12.00, 32.96 MB, version 1.0.0, requirements line reading "Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024" and nothing else. It was not alone. It arrived inside a wave of twenty-three separate MSFS 2024 SKUs from the same developer, covering Perth, Manaus, Almaty, Yangon, Thunder Bay, St John's, Darwin and sixteen more, all listed in a matter of days. simFlight.de wrote the wave up on 18 August 2026 and called every one of them optimised for the technical realities of the new simulator.

Here is the awkward part. The MSFS 2020 Aomori has been on the same shop since 12 February 2024, at the same €12.00, weighing 32.81 MB. Its description is the same description. Its five feature bullets are the same five feature bullets. The difference between the two downloads is 150 kilobytes. There is no cross-upgrade — the only upgrade offer on either page is the old free-upgrade deal for people who bought the FS2004/FSX/P3D version back in 2022. If you bought the 2020 Aomori in February 2024 and you have since moved to 2024, MFSG's answer is that you buy Aomori again.

So the two questions the badge raises get two different answers, and they are worth separating. Is the MSFS 2024 support native? Yes, in the only sense the store lets us verify: this is a 2024-only SKU that will not install into 2020, which is rarer than it sounds and better than the MSFS20/24 label the old listing used to wear. Is the content new? Nothing in the public record says so, and the file size, the recycled copy and the version number reset from 1.1.2 to 1.0.0 all say the opposite.

We read twenty-one sources for this one, and we should say plainly that most of them are catalogue entries rather than opinions. Five days after release there is no video review, no forum thread, no written review anywhere in English, German or Japanese, and no store ratings on either MSFS listing. That is the record, and padding it would be worse than admitting it.

What you are actually buying

Three Aomoris exist on simMarket, all from MFSG, all at or near €12, none of them upgrades to each other:

SKU	Sim	First listed	Version	Size	Price
RJSA AOMORI AIRPORT MSFS24 (PID 21493)	MSFS 2024 only	16 Aug 2026	v1.0.0	32.96 MB	€12.00
AOMORI AIRPORT RJSA MSFS20 (PID 18779)	MSFS 2020 only	12 Feb 2024	v1.1.2	32.81 MB	€12.00
AOMORI AIRPORT RJSA FS2004 FSX P3D3-5 (PID 16513)	FS9/FSX/P3D v3–v5	16 Apr 2022	v1.1.1	1.96 GB	€13.00

We checked the €12.00 against the developer's own store and there is no developer's own store. MFSG sells through simMarket and, as far as we can find, only through simMarket: the vendor page lists a Yahoo contact address and a Facebook link, FS Addon Compare shows every MFSG title at one retailer, and we found no in-sim Marketplace listing for any MFSG product. The price carries no discount and no 30-day-low field on the product's own price block — €12.00 is simply the price, shown to an unresolved session at 0% VAT, so a European buyer should expect their own rate at checkout. Contrail would not load for us at all, so we cannot speak to it.

What is in the 33 MB, per MFSG's own five bullets: the 2024 airport layout, a custom ground poly, a custom jetway, AI traffic compatibility and an FPS-friendly build. What is not in it, and this matters at Aomori specifically: surrounding terrain. The FS2004/FSX/P3D listing promised photoreal terrain with autogen trees; the MSFS listings promise nothing of the kind, and the developer's own screenshots show default Asobo landscape running right up to the airport fence. €12.00 buys the airport. The Tsugaru plain outside it is the one Microsoft already sold you.

There is one piece of buying friction worth knowing before you click. The listing states the product uses simMarket's simInstaller and "is available after purchase via our APP only" — there is no zip to download and file away, which the legacy P3D version did offer.

What the community consistently praises

MFSG's reputation, where it exists, is consistent and modest, and the Japanese end of the catalogue is the good end. The clearest statement of it is an AVSIM thread from 1–2 January 2021 in which a buyer asked flatly whether MFSG scenery was worth it. Two owners answered, both positive, and one added the line that has aged best: their Japanese sceneries tend to be a little nicer than the rest. The same poster warned that MFSG rarely discounts anything — the sale running that week was, he said, the first and only one he could remember. Five years on we have not found evidence he was wrong.

The second thing worth praising is not in the marketing at all. MFSG's feature list says nothing about night lighting, and the sixth product screenshot shows a fully lit field: apron floodlights throwing usable pools across the stands, a lit terminal frontage, a car park with individually lit rows and parked cars, taxiway centreline lighting and the approach lighting run stretching out into the dark towards the threshold. For a €12 regional airport that is a better night scene than the copy prepares you for, and it is the single most flattering thing in the product's own gallery.

Third, the seasons work. The fifth screenshot is Aomori in falling snow with the whole field under a smooth white blanket, bare trees, and drifts collecting around the terminal. That is MSFS 2024's own seasonal system doing the work rather than a bespoke winter texture set, but it does mean the one thing a buyer comes to Aomori for is not broken by the add-on. Given that the real airport averages twenty-two feet of snow a year, a scenery that fought the sim's snow would be close to useless here.

Fourth, and this is faint praise but honest praise: the approach lighting gantry on the ridge short of runway 24 is modelled, and the airport reads correctly from the air — the plateau setting, the 3,000-metre single runway, the terminal on the north side. It is recognisably Aomori and not a generic regional field.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The pricing structure. Still open, and new as of last week. Twelve euros for the 2020 SKU in February 2024, twelve euros again for the 2024 SKU in August 2026, with a free-upgrade path offered only from the 2022 FSX/P3D version. MFSG has published nothing explaining what the second twelve euros buys, and the outward evidence — identical description, identical feature list, 150 KB of size difference — does not answer the question in the customer's favour.

Old-model criticism on the legacy SKU. Status unknown for this build. The FS2004/FSX/P3D listing carries the only two customer ratings any Aomori of MFSG's has ever received: one three-star and one one-star, averaging 2.0 across two reviews. The one-star, from Giuseppe on 16 April 2022, called the MSFS-era rendition a conversion of very old models and textures and said the quality was well below free Japanese airports. That is one voice, on a different SKU, four years ago, and we will not pretend it is a finding about the 2026 build. It is a flag, and MFSG has not published anything that would clear it.

A dated accuracy error, unresolved in public. The second review on that listing, from Okuzaki on 28 June 2022, is more precise and more useful: the PAPI on the runway 06 side sits where it was before the old runway was extended. Aomori's runway went from 2,500 to 3,000 metres in 2005, so this is a twenty-year-old geometry surviving in a scenery that advertises a 2024 layout. Nobody has publicly re-checked it against the current build. If you are buying this for approach accuracy, that is the thing to look at first.

The 2024 layout claim is boilerplate. Still open. The sentence "Aomori Airport 2024 layout" appears verbatim on all three listings — including the FS2004/FSX/P3D one first sold in April 2022, two years before there was a 2024 layout to model. That does not make the current airport wrong, and the real Aomori has not changed much since its 2019 terminal renovation. It does mean the sentence certifies nothing.

Support and documentation are, effectively, absent. Still open. MFSG's linked website is mfsg.forumms.net, a free phpBB board whose front page carries a copyright notice reading 1998–2011, advises you it is best viewed at 1024×768, and states that membership is by invitation only. The Facebook page linked from the simMarket vendor listing had three followers when we looked, and its most recent post before the release wave was a progress update on Guam dated 13 August 2026. The vendor contact is a Yahoo address. There is no manual, no changelog and no bug tracker. All of this is at least in English, which for a European or American buyer is a small mercy — but the practical answer to "who do I ask" is simMarket, and the listing says so itself.

The record is empty, and that is a problem in itself. No AVSIM thread, no thread on forums.flightsimulator.com, no video review, no written review, nothing on the Japanese-language side beyond bare catalogue entries on pbook.jp and the wikiwiki MSFS wiki. Reddit is structurally unavailable to us, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing, but Reddit is not what is missing here — everything is. For once the Japanese record is not richer than the English one; it is the same emptiness in another language.

Performance and stability

We have no independent frame-rate data on this product and nobody has published any. What we can say is structural. This is a 33 MB airport with no custom terrain, no photogrammetry and a modest object count, sold explicitly as FPS-friendly, and there is no obvious mechanism by which it could hurt you.

The reason to keep an eye on it anyway is the argument that ran on the official MSFS forums from 24 August 2025 — fifty-one posts under the title "Navigating the complicated world of 'Compatible' but Unoptimized scenery of MSFS 2024". The original poster's complaint was that sceneries badged compatible routinely run worse in 2024 than in 2020. The most useful reply came from a developer who laid out the two available routes: move a 2020 product across quickly and ignore what the 2024 SDK offers, which is cheap because, in his words, "it is hard to make money with these upgrades"; or go back to source and rebuild, which takes months. Twenty-three SKUs in one week is not a months-per-airport schedule.

That is not an accusation, because we cannot see inside the package. It is the reason we are not scoring performance on the marketing's word.

Who should buy it

The Japan collector filling in Tōhoku. Buy it. RJSA is a real gap — there is no competing payware Aomori for MSFS from anyone, at any price, and the alternatives are a five-year-old freeware enhancement and default Asobo. Twelve euros is the going rate for exactly this class of add-on and MFSG does not discount, so waiting for a sale is waiting for nothing.

The winter-operations flyer. Buy it, with the caveat that the snow is the simulator's and not the developer's. What you get is an airport that looks right under 2024's snow rather than one modelled for it, and a proper 3,000-metre runway with CAT IIIa ILS to fly it down.

Anyone who already owns the MSFS 2020 Aomori. Do not buy it — not yet. You are being asked for a second €12.00 with no published statement of what changed, and until somebody who owns both puts them side by side, the honest position is that you would be buying the same 33 MB twice. If you still fly 2020 at all, you already have this airport.

The buyer who wants a showcase airport. Do not buy it. This is competent regional scenery with a good night scene, not a Pyreegue or an Aerosoft flagship. The terminal is a clean box, the clutter is sparse, and the world beyond the fence is untouched default. If your reference point for €12 is what the top studios sell at €18, you will feel the gap immediately.

The 2020 holdout with no plans to upgrade. Do not buy this SKU at all — it will not install. Buy PID 18779 instead, at the same price, and note that search engines still index that listing under its old MSFS24/20 title and SceneryAddons still labels it MSFS 2020/2024. The page itself now says MSFS20 and requires MSFS 2020. Trust the requirements line, not the cached title.

Where it stands today

Five days old, unreviewed, and sold into a wave large enough that no individual product in it has had a chance to be looked at. That is the honest position on 21 August 2026, and it is why the score sits at 3.0 rather than lower: the specific complaints on the record belong to a different SKU from 2022, and the specific virtues — the night lighting, the snow behaviour, the correct plateau geometry — are visible in the developer's own gallery and can be checked by anyone before they buy.

The most telling single data point is not on simMarket at all. In March 2026, two years after MFSG's Aomori went on sale for MSFS, AVSIM's Round the World Race team planned a Tōhoku tour through Sendai, Odate-Noshiro, Aomori and Hakodate and published scenery recommendations for every leg. For RJSA they linked the free flightsim.to enhancement by highmemfix1 — a March 2021 mod last updated in February 2022, 9,000-plus downloads, 4.9 out of 5 from four ratings, listed as working in both 2020 and 2024. Not the payware. That is what a thin public record does to a product: it does not get argued about, it just does not get picked.

What would change the picture is trivially small and entirely in MFSG's hands. Publish a changelog. Say what was rebuilt for the 2024 SDK and what was carried over. Offer the 2020 owners something. Confirm whether the runway 06 PAPI has moved since 2022. Any one of those would turn a €12.00 question mark into a €12.00 decision, and none of them requires a line of code.