Shanghai Pudong ZSPD: runs in 2024, was not built for it, ships without an ILS

On 26 March 2021, WF Scenery Studio announced it was finished. A team member had found their unreleased Shanghai Pudong scenery on Xianyu, Alibaba's second-hand marketplace, before it had gone on sale anywhere legitimate; the member quit, and the studio cancelled Tianjin, Changsha and Chongqing. FSElite ran the story that morning. The next day, Pudong went on sale for Prepar3D anyway.

Ninety-six days later it appeared for Microsoft Flight Simulator, four days after WF announced it was being made at all. That is what a conversion looks like when the modelling is already done.

Five years on, that same package is the only rendition of one of the world's busiest airports that anybody sells for MSFS. It is still on sale, still at v1.2.5, still carrying the same store note it carried on day one: "It is recommended to install Navigraph to solve ILS problem." That sentence is doing an enormous amount of work, and most of this review is about it.

We published a review of WF's Hong Kong VHHH for MSFS 2024 recently and came away with a frame — native is not the same as new. Hong Kong was a genuinely native 2024 build wrapped around 2021 modelling. Pudong inverts it exactly. The 2024 support here is not native at all, and the airport underneath is newer than Hong Kong's. Contrail's own product page carries the field MSFS 2024 Native: No; Orbx labels it "MSFS 2024 Compatible"; simMarket sells one SKU, "MSFS24/20", for both simulators, where Hong Kong and Zhengzhou are split into separate 2020 and 2024 products. This is a 2020 package that Microsoft's compatibility layer happens to load.

This review reads 23 sources: three storefronts, WF's own site and news posts, five Microsoft Flight Simulator forum threads, a Navigraph support thread, an AVSIM argument, three flightsim.to companion add-ons, two written news reports, one full written review and the developer's trailer. Reddit is structurally unreachable from where we work, so the sentiment-at-a-glance check that would normally sit alongside the forum record is missing — read the tally below with that in mind.

What you are actually buying

One product, both simulators, no upgrade path between them and no 2024 rebuild pending as far as anyone has said publicly.

Where	Price	Notes
simMarket (WF's own channel)	€23.90	Listed as Published by and Sold by WF Scenery Studio. simInstaller/App delivery. v1.2.5, 1.27 GB
OrbxDirect	A$35.99	Orbx's own on-page estimate: US$25.63 / €21.94 / £18.79. Labelled "MSFS 2024 Compatible"
Contrail	US$28.48	4.65 from 23 votes. States MSFS 2024 Native: No. 1.27 GB download, 2.7 GB installed
In-sim Marketplace	—	Not there. Never has been
Upgrade from the P3D version	€12.00	Only if you bought ZSPD P3D4.5-5 (€26.90, 27 March 2021) on the same simMarket account

The "SHOP" link on wfscenerystudio.com points straight at simMarket's WF vendor catalogue, and simMarket names WF as the seller of record — so simMarket is the developer's own shop, not a reseller marking it up. simMarket's terms say displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for an unresolved session is 0%. Orbx's product page says sales tax is calculated at checkout, while its site footer says VAT is included where applicable. On paper Orbx looks about two euros cheaper. We are not going to tell you it is, because neither total is fixed until an address is attached to it.

There is no in-sim Marketplace listing and no Xbox version, and that is not an oversight. Asked on the forums on 27 August 2025 why ZSPD, ZBAA and VHHH have never reached Xbox, JakTrax78 offered the obvious answer nine days later: optimising this much geometry for console would mean gutting it. Nobody from WF replied. WF does use the Marketplace — Hongqiao landed there on 30 August 2024, Zhengzhou on 15 April 2025 — so Pudong's absence is a choice about this product.

In the box: the whole airfield, T1 and T2 with modelled interiors, the S1/S2 satellite hall, the COMAC plant next door, the elevated roadways, and an animated Maglev train. No static aircraft — a deliberate omission, and the community filled it in anyway.

What the community consistently praises

The modelling is the thing everybody agrees on, and the agreement is unusually broad. Giuseppe Nelva's Twinfinite review (6 July 2021) called the terminals "a masterpiece" with full interiors airside and landside, and singled out "some of the best custom jetways I've seen on the market". simMarket's Stevens (9 April 2022) put WF "up there with the likes of the greats, Flytampa, flightbeam, Aerosoft". Even the sceptical Chinese-language review on the same page — 少博, 8 November 2022 — while arguing that Pudong feels thinner on detail than WF's own Beijing Capital, still rates the modelling and materials as first-rate and ends by saying it is worth buying. That is about as close to consensus as an aggregated record gets.

The ground work holds up under a pilot's eye rather than a screenshot. Nelva reports taxiways correctly labelled — which matters at an airport this size, because it means default ATC gives usable instructions and AI traffic negotiates the field — PAPI lights properly calibrated for visual approaches, and markings that match the charts with weathering that is neither faded nor cartoonish. Fuel trucks work. All ground services function. These are the details that separate a scenery you can operate from a scenery you can look at.

And it is more complete than its own marketing lets on. WF's product page — reproduced verbatim on Contrail and Orbx — describes an airport with "two main passenger terminals, flanked on both sides by four operational parallel runways" and a satellite terminal that "has been planned since 2015". That copy is a stale Wikipedia paste. The real satellite hall opened on 16 September 2019; the fourth and fifth runways opened in 2015. The scenery models all of it. The GSX Pro profile maintained by LongYoi of Virtual Juneyao Airlines covers "T1 and T2 and part of S1 and S2" (his listing is bilingual; the Chinese is the primary text), and when a user reported doubled VDGS units at every satellite gate in early 2026, LongYoi's answer was that one of the two is WFSS's own decorative unit and the other is GSX's. You do not get duplicate VDGS at a terminal that is not modelled.

All five runways are present, including 15/33, which is the answer to a question people keep asking. The FS2Crew RAAS profile for this scenery lists "17R 35L 17L 35R 16R 34L 16L 34R 15 33" and notes that 15/33 had to be given manual coordinates. Nelva explains why: the simulator recognises only four runways at ZSPD, so 15/33 is fully modelled visually but is not a functional runway in the sim. In the real world it is used almost exclusively as a test strip for the COMAC plant, so the practical loss is close to zero — but it is a modelling presence, not an operational one, and the difference matters if you were planning to land on it.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The ILS, and the navdata question — still open

This is the one. WF ships Pudong without usable ILS data of its own and tells you, on the store page, to go and buy Navigraph. The release announcement on 1 July 2021 went further: if SIDs and STARs vanish from the FMC, edit content.xml by hand to place wfscenerystudio-zspd between fs-base and navigraph-navdata. That is a paid dependency plus a config-file edit, disclosed in a sentence most buyers will read as a suggestion.

To be fair to WF, the origin was not their fault. Nelva found published approaches, SIDs and STARs all present, with localisers shifted slightly off the centreline — an inherited fault in the simulator's own Chinese airport data, common to the whole region in 2021. Navigraph's support account posted on 2 July 2021 that they and WF had worked on it together, had fixed it, and that a coming update would remove the workaround entirely.

Four years later it has not stayed fixed. In January 2025 a user reported on the Navigraph forum that ZSPD approach procedures were being lost in MSFS 2024 with WF's scenery installed, that no amount of XML reordering helped, and — bluntly — that "the WF ZSPD has discontinued ILS data". Navigraph's Richard closed the thread as solved with the shortest possible answer: "we offer the data, and the data are in place and correct." Then: contact WF. Status: still open. It is a different failure from the one our Hong Kong review found — Hong Kong excludes terminal waypoints outright and needs a third-party freeware NavData patch; Pudong strips the ILS, tells you to buy a subscription, and then breaks again under the 2024 loader — but it is the same family, and it is a genuine strike against the assumption that this problem was ever solved.

Night lighting — two credible sources, opposite verdicts

Nelva: night lighting "looks great", the airport takes on "a very natural look after dark", and the lit interiors read well through tinted glass. simMarket's Markus, four months later on 13 November 2021, agrees about the terminals and then takes the rest apart: every other building on the field wears "extremely bright window textures", every window evenly lit, the ATC tower interior fully illuminated in a way that "simply wouldn't work in reality and looks very odd even from a distance". Both are describing the same scenery. Both are right — the terminals got night textures and the estate buildings got a uniform emissive. Which of the two you notice depends entirely on whether you park or fly the pattern. Status: still open.

Texture flickering — mitigated, not gone

Flickering at the modelled underground roadways was patched within days of release; Nelva confirms most of it was fixed by 6 July 2021 and what remained was angle-dependent. Markus, in November, still saw it in grass areas, terminal walls and interiors "from a bit of a distance", and argued the distance at which it appears is too close to ignore. Status: mitigated.

The small accuracy misses

Rubber deposits are painted onto every runway, when in reality only 16L/34R and 17R/35L take the landings. The COMAC aprons show painted outlines where the C919s and ARJ21s should be, with nothing parked in them. An AI pathing glitch where 16R/34L meets taxiway Romeo 4 sends landing traffic across the grass. None of these will change your mind about the purchase; all three are still there.

Performance and stability

The record splits hard along the hardware line, and the split is the most useful thing in it.

Nelva's numbers are the only methodical ones published: RTX 3070, Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB, 1440p, Ultra — about 10 FPS below default scenery. For an airport of this size that is a good result, and he says so.

Everyone reporting trouble is reporting a memory problem rather than a frame problem. Yiheng, on simMarket in March 2024, measured "7gb+ VRAM" and asked for a reduced-detail version, recommending a 10 GB card as the floor. yuan, writing in Chinese in September 2021, reported repeated crashes to desktop at the airport on a 3070 with VRAM visibly saturated. Felipe called it "excessive stuttering when landing, almost unplayable" on 7 July 2021. On the forums in August 2021 users traded CTD reports after Sim Update 5, with 16 GB of system RAM the common factor. Read together: this scenery does not cost you frames so much as it costs you headroom, and when the headroom runs out it does not degrade, it falls over.

Whether five years of hardware has solved that is genuinely unclear, and the most recent data point is not encouraging about WF's engine work in general. On 10 July 2025 a user with a 5090, a 9800X3D and a Pimax Crystal reported that WF's Beijing Capital turned their sim into "a stuttering mess" in VR with the PMDG 777, while WF's Hong Kong ran fine on the same rig. Nobody answered. The thread auto-closed a year later. That is a sibling product, not this one, and we are not going to transfer the finding — but it is the only 2025-era VR datapoint anyone has published about this developer's large airports, and Pudong is bigger than Beijing.

There is no public issue tracker to check against. WF's entire support page is one Gmail address. There is no changelog: v1.2.0 shipped in January 2023 with release notes reading, in full, "Built with new SDK", and v1.2.5 arrived in September 2025 with nothing published at all. Meanwhile Hong Kong's 2020 build sits at v1.5.5 and its separate 2024 build at v1.0.3. Pudong has moved half a point in five years.

Who should buy it

If you fly airliners in and out of China and you are on MSFS 2020, buy it. This is the only Pudong anyone sells, the default is measurably broken — a major terminal building goes missing at the stock airport, reported in January 2023 and formally bug-reported with all mods removed in July 2024 — and on the simulator this package was actually built for it is excellent. Add the freeware FSLTL static pack built specifically for it and the empty stands stop being empty.

If you are on MSFS 2024 and you have a Navigraph subscription, buy it — with the caveat in front of you. It loads, it looks the way it looks, and Navigraph will usually put the localisers where they belong. But you are buying a compatibility-mode 2020 package, you may have to fight content.xml, and there is an unresolved 2025 report of approach procedures disappearing entirely under 2024. Know that going in.

If you are on MSFS 2024 and you do not have Navigraph, do not buy this yet. The store note is not a suggestion. Without third-party navdata you are flying visual approaches into a five-runway hub with localisers that do not line up, and the subscription costs more per year than the scenery costs once.

If you have a graphics card with 8 GB or less, do not buy it. Two independent users measured this airport past 7 GB of VRAM, and the failure mode reported is a crash to desktop rather than a slideshow. That is a bad trade at €23.90.

If you fly exclusively in VR at a big hub, hold off. The evidence is thin and what exists is unflattering about this developer's largest sceneries. Wait for somebody to publish numbers.

If you are on Xbox, there is nothing to decide. It has never been on the Marketplace and there is no sign it is coming.

Where it stands today

Pudong is a curious artefact: a scenery whose modelling has aged far better than its plumbing. The terminals, the jetways, the ground textures and the satellite hall are all things a developer would be pleased to ship in 2026. The navdata story, the missing changelog, the single Gmail address and the "MSFS24/20" label on a package that Contrail flatly reports is not native to 2024 all belong to 2021, because that is when they were written and nothing has revisited them.

The frame we carried in from Hong Kong — native is not the same as new — turns out to describe this product precisely, in reverse. Hong Kong got a real 2024 build wrapped around older modelling. Pudong got no 2024 build at all, wrapped around modelling that is genuinely current: the satellite complex that opened in September 2019 is in there, the fifth runway is drawn even though the simulator will not fly it, and the marketing copy that says otherwise is simply out of date about its own product. Two questions, two different answers, in the same catalogue. It is worth asking them separately every time.

What has not changed is the shape of the studio. WF announced in March 2021 that it was done making new airports, then spent five years converting the back catalogue and quietly resuming — Hongqiao in 2024, Zhengzhou in 2025 — and in a tenth-anniversary post on 20 May 2026 promised "even more high-quality airport add-ons" for the decade ahead. They are still here. They are just not, on current evidence, coming back to Pudong. If a 2024-native rebuild is ever announced, that is the version to wait for. Until then this is the only Shanghai Pudong there is, and on most days it is a very good one.