SimSoft AirportInfo 2.0: a five-simulator badge on an app that talks to no simulator

The most interesting thing about AirportInfo 2.0 is not in the program. It is in
a WHOIS record. Type simsoftsceneries.com into a browser — the address SimSoft
still hands out at the bottom of every announcement they have ever posted — and
you do not get a flight sim developer. You get a blank white page with a Chinese
forum loaded inside an iframe and a Baidu analytics tag. The domain was
re-registered by somebody else on 22 November 2025. It has no MX record, which
means contact@simsoftsceneries.com, the support address printed under SimSoft's
own product announcements, cannot receive mail. The Discord invite in their
forum posts, discord.gg/nuzxGhzk, returns "Unknown Invite".

Nine months after all that, on 6 August 2026, SimSoft put a new paid product on
simMarket.

That is the frame this review cannot escape, and it is a shame, because the
software itself is the nicest thing SimSoft has made. AirportInfo 2.0 is a
12.99 MB Windows program that takes an ICAO code and gives you back an airport:
codes, coordinates, elevation, magnetic variation, runways, ILS installations,
ATC frequencies, live METAR and TAF with a plain-language decode, and two small
wind calculators. It is clean, it is quick, and at €5.95 it costs less than a
sandwich. The question is whether any of it is worth paying for when Little
Navmap is free, the simulator already knows most of it, and the developer's own
front door leads to an advertising farm.

One more thing to say before we start, because it shapes everything below: there
is barely any public record here. Not a thin record — a nearly absent one. We
found one customer review of 2.0, two of version 1, one announcement thread with
716 views and zero replies, two trade news posts, and no video coverage
whatsoever. AVSIM has never discussed it. Reddit, which is where sentiment on a
€6 utility would normally live, is structurally unavailable to us and has been
for every review on this site. We read sixteen sources and most of them are
primary documents rather than opinions. Treat the confidence here accordingly.

What you are actually buying

A standalone Windows desktop application. Not a plugin, not an in-sim panel, not
an EFB, not anything that touches your simulator.

Price	€5.95 on simMarket, reduced from €7.00
Discount	Genuine. simMarket's 30-day price low reads €7.00 — the undiscounted figure — with a live countdown showing twelve days remaining on a −15% sale
Listed	6 August 2026 (PID 21462)
Size	12.99 MB
Requirements	Windows 10/11. That is the entire list
Store	simMarket only. FS Addon Compare shows no other retailer for it
Upgrade path for 1.x owners	None. The 2022 version is still on sale separately at €5.00

Two notes on that price. simMarket's terms say displayed prices include the
applicable VAT, which for an unresolved session is 0% — so €5.95 is the figure a
logged-out browser sees, and an EU buyer should expect VAT on top at checkout.
And we could not verify the price against SimSoft's own store because SimSoft no
longer has one, or a website, for the reasons above.

The simulator badges on the listing say MFS20, MFS24, P3D5, P3D6 and X-Plane.
Five simulators. The program connects to none of them. It does not read your
aircraft position, it does not know what airport you are at, it does not inject
weather, and it does not use SimConnect. Those pills are store shelving, not
capability. Vasco Ferreira at MSFS Addons was straight about it on 20 August
2026: it is "a separate real-world data app that runs in its own window". You
could uninstall every flight simulator on your machine and AirportInfo 2.0 would
work exactly as well.

Which is not automatically a criticism. It means it runs happily beside X-Plane
or P3D, sits on a second monitor without stealing frames, and — genuinely worth
something — cannot be broken by a simulator update, because there is nothing for
the simulator to break. Tools that read sim data are the first casualties of
every Sim Update. This one is immune by construction.

What is in the tabs

The store's bullet list undersells the program. The developer's own screenshots
show eight tabs: Overview, Weather, Runways, ILS, Frequencies, Approaches, Tools
and Notes. Overview gives you codes, coordinates, elevation, time zone, magnetic
variation, region, links out to the airport's official site and Wikipedia, and an
Export Briefing button. Frequencies groups by service with a one-click copy for
each entry. None of Approaches, Notes, the copy button or the briefing export
appear in the simMarket feature list at all.

What the community consistently praises

There is not much community, so let us be precise about who said what.

The strongest verified thing about the product is its weather, and we checked it
rather than took it on trust. The Weather tab pulls live from aviationweather.gov
— the US National Weather Service's aviation portal — and decodes on your own
machine. SimSoft's showcase screenshot shows Heathrow reporting
METAR EGLL 061920Z AUTO 30005KT 270V330 9999 NCD 21/04 Q1023, decoded as wind
from 300° at 5 kt, varying 270 to 330, visibility 10 km or more, no cloud
detected, 21°C with a dew point of 4°C, altimeter 30.21 inHg. Every line of that
is correct, including the hPa-to-inches conversion. Whoever wrote the decoder
knew what they were doing. TAF gets the same treatment, broken into its BECMG
groups with each period spelled out.

The interface is the second thing. The one 2022 buyer who liked version 1 —
"Total", 10 October 2022 — called it "easy to read and very quick", and 2.0 is a
visible generation on from what he was praising. It is dark, dense, legible, and
loads instantly.

The two planning calculators are the third, and they are the only part of the
product that does something rather than merely displays something. A wind
component calculator returns headwind, tailwind and crosswind for a chosen
runway end; a best-runway calculator ranks every end by headwind for a given
wind. There is a quiet piece of correctness here that is easy to miss: the
runway ends are offered by true heading, and METAR winds are reported in degrees
true, so the arithmetic pairs properly. Feed it the tower's wind instead — which
is magnetic — and you will be out by the local variation, and the app does not
warn you. But used the obvious way, with the METAR sitting one tab away, it is
right.

And SimSoft, when they were reachable, were pleasant. The Cork Airport thread on
the official forums has the developer answering buyers within hours across
2021 and 2022, including saying plainly on 9 February 2022 that animated
stairs were "beyond my control" because MSFS places them. That is a good answer.
It is also, on the public record, close to the last customer conversation SimSoft
had.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The reference data is not reference-grade — status: open, and acknowledged

The single review of 2.0 on simMarket, four stars from a French buyer called
ANTIOPE dated 21 August 2026, is a complaint about a number: the course of KJFK
runway 22L, which charts give as 224° and AirportInfo gives as 221°.

We checked. AirNav publishes KJFK 22L as 224° magnetic, 211° true, with the
airport's variation at 13°W. So 221° is neither. It is not the charted magnetic
course and it is not the true alignment. And SimSoft's own Runways screenshot
hints at why: it shows both Heathrow runways at exactly 90.0°T and 270.0°T,
which is the paper alignment implied by the runway numbers rather than a
surveyed bearing. If headings are being derived rather than sourced, 22L becomes
220–221° and the reviewer's number falls out of the arithmetic.

This is one report, so treat it as one report. But it lands on the product's own
warning label. The app itself prints, under the Overview panel, that data "is
aggregated from public aeronautical datasets and may not reflect current
AIRAC-cycle information", and under Runways that headings are true "as published
in the source dataset" and that magnetic course may differ. The developer knows.
The marketing above those panels says "Complete Runway Data You Can Trust" and
"Verified Data — sourced from trusted aeronautical datasets".

The ILS tab overstates itself — status: open

The showcase screenshot for "Complete ILS Information" lists all four Heathrow
localisers — IAA, IRR, IBB, ILL, on 110.30 and 109.50 — with the identifiers and
frequencies correct. It also lists every one of them as Category I with DME "Not
available". The UK AIP chart for the same runway, AIRAC 23 January 2025, is
titled ILS/DME I-AA RWY 09L. The DME is in the name of the procedure.

The frequencies are free-dataset frequencies — status: open

AirportInfo shows Heathrow Ground on 121.700 and Delivery on 121.975. The free
web lookup at airportmap.de shows exactly the same values; the current UK AIP
publishes Ground as 121.705 under 8.33 kHz spacing. This is not really an
accuracy failure, it is an identity statement: you are looking at the same
public dataset that the free tools read, presented more attractively. The
marketing beside it says "Always Up to Date — regularly updated to ensure
reliable communications", and there is no published changelog, update cadence or
AIRAC cycle anywhere to support that.

Version 1's central complaint was never that it was wrong — status: fixed

Worth crediting. The 2-star review of version 1, from "Besim" on 26 October 2022,
was blunt: "Largely useless. The METAR data is also available in Flight
Simulator and the maps are excerpts from OpenStreetMap. The information on the
runways does not even include ILS frequency information." Two of those three are
answered by 2.0 — there is now a full ILS tab, and the weather is decoded rather
than merely displayed. The first objection stands entirely.

The developer has gone quiet — status: open

SimSoft's entire footprint on the official MSFS forums is announcement posts with
no follow-up: AirportInfo's own thread has 716 views and zero replies since
10 October 2022; Punta Gorda, 1,338 views and zero replies. Their last forum
post of any kind was Salalah in September 2024. AirportInfo 2.0 was not announced
there at all. Add the lapsed domain, the dead mailbox and the dead Discord, and
the honest position is that your only support channel is simMarket's ticket
system.

Performance and stability

There is almost nothing to report, and that is the point. It is a 12.99 MB
desktop app running outside the simulator. It cannot cost you frames, it cannot
cause a CTD, and no Sim Update can invalidate it. Nobody in any source we read
reported a crash, a hang or a conflict.

The one real fragility is the weather feed. Everything live in this product —
METAR, TAF, and by extension the usefulness of the wind calculators — depends on
aviationweather.gov continuing to answer requests in the shape the app expects.
NOAA has restructured those endpoints before. If it changes again, the product
needs a patch from a developer whose published contact address bounces.

Who should buy it

The multi-sim flyer who wants one window on a second monitor. If you fly
P3D or X-Plane as much as MSFS and you are tired of a browser tab for weather
and another for frequencies, €5.95 for a tidy, sim-agnostic window is a
defensible small purchase. You are buying the presentation, not the data. Go in
knowing that.

The simmer who hates subscriptions. Navigraph is the professional answer to
this problem and it is a recurring charge forever. This is €5.95 once, with no
account and no login. If that trade matters more to you than currency of data,
it is a rational choice.

The VFR pilot who wants quick crosswind numbers. The best-runway ranking is
the genuinely additive feature and the one thing here that free tools make you
assemble yourself.

Do not buy it if you already run Little Navmap. This is the profile to be
firm with. Little Navmap is free, gives you the same airport data plus a moving
map, an elevation profile, aircraft performance and a live connection to your
simulator, and the community's own verdict on it — from the long Little Navmap
versus Navigraph thread on the official forums, 16 October 2023 — is that
"there's nothing that can compare to it", and that it would be a bargain at
€50–100. AirportInfo 2.0 offers you a subset of that, prettier, for money.
Nothing in the record justifies the swap.

Do not buy it if you need current data. If you fly on VATSIM, fly real-world
IFR procedures, or care whether a frequency is the one being used today, this
product tells you itself not to rely on it. Believe it.

Where it stands today

As of 20 August 2026, AirportInfo 2.0 is a fortnight old, has one customer
review, no video coverage, no forum discussion and one trade write-up. It sits
at simMarket weekly #43, which for a €5.95 impulse buy in launch week says more
about the price than the demand.

The software deserves better than its situation. Somebody sat down and built a
careful METAR decoder, laid out eight tabs that make sense, wrote honest warning
labels into the panels, and shipped it for the price of a coffee. If this had
arrived in 2022 with a live website behind it, we would be calling it a pleasant
little utility and moving on.

But the record is what the record is. The data underneath is the free public
dataset with a confirmed discrepancy at one of the world's busiest airports, the
ILS tab contradicts the AIP on a detail as basic as whether Heathrow has DME,
the marketing above every panel promises "verified" and "trusted" while the panel
below it says the opposite, and the developer's published support address has not
been able to receive mail since November 2025. That is not a €5.95 problem. It is
a question of whether anyone will be there when the weather API changes.

Our score is 2.9, and it is worth saying which half of the product dragged it
under three. Not the interface, which is good. Not the weather, which is right.
The support and longevity picture did that, and it is the one thing SimSoft could
fix this week with a working contact address and a changelog.