FlyTampa St Maarten Complete: the best Maho Beach in the hobby is trapped in P3D

The whole point of TNCM is a chain-link fence. Not the terminal, not the ramp, not the two gates that see a widebody a day — the fence at the eastern end of Maho Beach where holidaymakers stand with their backs to a departing 737 and let the jet blast throw them into the sand, because at some point somebody decided that was a holiday. Every rendition of Princess Juliana gets judged on the same three things: the beach, the fence, and the sight picture on short final to runway 10. For eighteen years, FlyTampa's has been the answer.

That is also the problem.

FlyTampa-StMaarten Complete began life in FS2004, was reissued for FSX in April 2008 — free to everyone who already owned the FS9 version — took a serious art and layout pass as v1.5 in October 2013, and then walked Prepar3D up through v3 and v4 to v5, arriving at version 2.1 on 1 September 2020. Then it stopped. It is still on FlyTampa's front page. It is still $31.00. It is pointedly not labelled "Legacy Product", the tag FlyTampa invented for their own ageing catalogue and hung on Corfu, Grenadines, Montreal V1 and half a dozen others. And it is not supported on Prepar3D v6, MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024 or X-Plane.

On 19 October 2020 FlyTampa put two terminal screenshots on Facebook with the line "Some development previews of our favourite FS9 airport rebuilt for FS2020". FSElite's FlyTampa index has carried fifteen stories since — Amsterdam, Boston, Sydney, Toronto, Humberside, Las Vegas twice, an Area 51 project — and not one of them is St Maarten. Six years is a long preview.

So this review is really about a date, not a product. The product is very good. The date is 2020. We read 24 sources for this one: FlyTampa's own store, product, downloads and support pages; both simMarket listings and their 39 combined customer reviews; eight AVSIM threads running from April 2008 to October 2020; the 2020 preview coverage at FSNews, MSFS Addons, Threshold and simFlight's sister outlets; FSElite's developer index; Grizzly Bear Sims; two video walkthroughs; and the MSFS competition. Reddit is unreachable from where we work, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing — for a product this old that matters less than it would for a new release, because the forum record here is eighteen years deep.

What you are actually buying

Two SKUs, and the cheaper one is a trap for anybody who wants what the package is famous for.

Product	What is in it	FlyTampa direct	simMarket
FlyTampa-StMaarten Complete	TNCM, TFFJ (St Barths), TNCS (Saba), plus all three islands in photoscenery with custom autogen and mesh	$31.00	€31.00
FlyTampa-StMaarten	TNCM only	$24.00	€24.00

Seven euros — or seven dollars — is the entire difference between one airport and three airports plus three islands. Nobody should buy the single-airport version. That has been true since 2008, when an AVSIM thread titled "Be careful!! flytampa St maarten from simmarket" filled up with people who had bought the wrong one because the store listings looked identical. Eighteen years later the two listings still look almost identical.

Both stores show the same number. They are not the same price. FlyTampa sell direct through BMT Micro in US dollars, and simMarket price in euros; at the 1.168 EUR/USD rate on 20 August 2026, simMarket's €31.00 is about $36.20. Both figures are pre-tax for an unresolved browser session — simMarket's terms say displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for a session with no country resolved means zero, and BMT Micro add VAT at checkout for EU buyers. On that like-for-like ex-VAT basis FlyTampa direct is roughly 15% cheaper, and for a buyer outside the EU it is simply cheaper full stop. Buy it from FlyTampa.

What is not in the box matters as much as what is. There is no Grand Case (TFFG) — the French-side strip on the north of the island that most people assume comes with a St Maarten package, because the MSFS competition bundles it. FlyTampa's three airports are the Dutch-side international, St Barths, and Saba: the two shortest, most alarming commercial approaches in the Caribbean plus the one everybody has seen on YouTube. It is a coherent set. It is just not the set the "Complete" in the title implies to a 2026 reader.

The simulators, properly

The store listing says "FS2004 FSX P3D" and simMarket's requirements line says "FS2004, FSX, Prepar3D v3/v4/v5". Both are correct, and both undersell how uneven that support is. FlyTampa's own product page lists six headline features and flags three of them "(P3Dv4&5 only)": the SODE and Ctrl-J animated jetways, the wet-pavement weather effects, and the dynamic lighting. What an FS2004 owner installs is recognisably a different, older scenery from what a P3Dv5 owner installs, at the same price.

There is no Prepar3D v6 support in any formal sense — no v6 column on the product page, nothing in the support FAQ, and a downloads page that still tops out at a "Universal Installer P3Dv4 P3Dv5". P3D v6 shipped in October 2023 and three years on FlyTampa's entire legacy line has not formally followed it. The one qualification, and it is worth having: asked directly in December 2023, FlyTampa's George suggested pointing the Universal Installer at the v6 folder, and a customer reported flying into TNCM on v6 in February 2024 without trouble. That is an unsupported workaround with one public success behind it, not a supported configuration. Treat v6 as at your own risk rather than as impossible.

What the community consistently praises

Performance, over and over, for eighteen years. This is the single most repeated finding in the record and it survives every generation of hardware. In March 2013 an AVSIM thread on the scenery turned into a queue of people reporting good frame rates with the PMDG 737NGX loaded. In April 2016 a simMarket reviewer reported no out-of-memory errors "with tons of other add ons" in P3D v3.2.3. In April 2020 another logged "well above 40fps on my average rig (i7 gen 3, gtx 970)" in P3D v4.4 — on a graphics card that was six years old at the time. A 2024 buyer on FSX Steam simply wrote "Excellent FPS!". For a photoscenery-backed three-island package, that is a genuinely unusual record.

The approach and the sight picture are right. The most useful review on either simMarket listing is from a poster who says he is from SXM and calls the airport "very close or identical to the real thing" (4 November 2013), including approving of FlyTampa demolishing the old terminal in the v1.5 update rather than keeping it as a monument. Grizzly Bear Sims put FlyTampa's TNCM in its top ten payware airports for Prepar3D v4 in August 2019. An AVSIM poster who says he has been to both TNCM and St Barths "countless times" argued in October 2020 that FlyTampa's versions still beat MSFS's own handcrafted ones — a striking claim about a scenery that was then seven years past its major art pass.

Saba and St Barths are the sleeper value. Almost every long review drifts away from Princess Juliana and starts talking about the other two. A French reviewer's 2019 note on the Complete listing is the best summary of what you are buying: TNCM in an airliner is one thing, St Barths in a single is harder because the relief hides the runway, and Saba's runway is "grande comme un ticket de métro". That progression — heavy metal, then hard, then absurd — is the package's actual design.

The night lighting. Consistently praised across the record, and specifically since v1.5 rebuilt the runway lighting in October 2013. The 2024 FSX Steam reviewer singles it out as good enough "that you could suspend reality"; a 2017 reviewer says the scenery holds up "at dawn, day, sunset and night". P3D v4 and v5 owners additionally get true dynamic lighting; the three older simulators do not.

The ambient life. Animated AI shipping from windsurfers up to cruise liners, animated road traffic, static ships, volumetric grass, 3D people, and — in FSX and later — birds and dolphins. The sand-blast effect off the runway 10 threshold onto Maho Beach is FlyTampa's own headline feature and it is the thing people buy this for.

Free updates, for eighteen years, on one purchase. FS9 owners were handed the FSX build free in April 2008. simMarket customers found the FSX Complete had simply appeared in their download account. v1.5 (2013), v1.8 (FSX and P3D v3), v2.0 (P3D v4) and v2.1 (P3D v5) all arrived at no charge. FlyTampa never once monetised a compatibility bump on this product. That is the strongest single argument for the price.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Saba is broken for some people, and has been for a decade. Still open. In July 2016 an AVSIM poster described invisible humps in Saba's runway that bounced or crashed his aircraft, drew a runway profile in ASCII to explain it, and noted he had posted on FlyTampa's support forum and "never got a reply". On 3 April 2023 a simMarket reviewer wrote that Saba's issues, "mentionned several time on FlyTampa support forum, are still not fixed (P3D V5)". Seven years apart, same airport, same silence. Some of this is third-party mesh conflict rather than FlyTampa's code, but the second half of that complaint — no reply — is entirely theirs.

ORBX Vector fights the elevation, and you fix it by hand. Still open. The v1.8 thread on AVSIM in 2016 is essentially a support queue for this: the airport sits in a crater or floats above the terrain until you disable ORBX Vector's airport elevation corrections, and Saba does not even appear in Vector's list, so you have to copy a BGL between two Vector folders and rename it to make it selectable. Users worked out the fix and shared it; FlyTampa did not automate it. In February 2020 someone hit the identical problem at TFFJ and got told to start a new thread.

The Maho Beach crowd does not do the thing. Mitigated, not fixed. The most specific criticism in the whole record is a German simMarket review from 10 November 2016: the beach is "viel zu leblos und starr" — far too lifeless and rigid — with sun loungers where there are none in reality, and, crucially, no crowd pressed against the fence when a KLM 747 or an Air France A340 comes over at fifteen metres. He also noted the road bridge at the far end of the runway was missing. He still called it among the best sceneries on the market. Against him: a January 2024 buyer describes people walking the beach, waving, and riding scooters. Both are right. There are animated people, and they have improved; what there isn't is a crowd that reacts to an arrival, which is exactly what the airport is famous for. The MSFS competition made this a selling point — Airworthy Designs' changelog boasts of increasing beach-people draw distance "by a factor of 5" — and that comparison is not kind.

The French half of the island is thin. Still open. The same 2016 reviewer, who has been there, points out that the prettier half of Saint-Martin gets far less attention than the Dutch side. With no Grand Case in the package, the northern half of the island is photoscenery and autogen and nothing else.

Old complaints that are genuinely fixed. The original FSX release shipped with the runway numbered 9/27 and AI aircraft landing in the water short of it, plus missing tower frequencies at TNCM and no COM at Saba (April 2008) — the renumbering to 10/28 came in a free 1.2 update and the AFCAD problems went with it. PAPI lights too dim to see until very short final (March 2013) were fixable with a forum BGL and folded into later builds. The old terminal building, still standing years after it was demolished in reality, was removed in v1.5 in October 2013. On the evidence, FlyTampa fixed almost everything raised in this scenery's first six years, and almost nothing raised in its last ten.

Performance and stability

The frame-rate record is excellent and consistent — see above. Stability is nearly as good, with two documented exceptions.

The first is Prepar3D v5. When v5 Hotfix 1 landed in May 2020, an experienced AVSIM poster reported St Maarten blowing out his main memory on load. Four other users in the same thread reported clean loads, and the reporter's own fix was a reinstall; another user cleared it by deleting his shader cache. Verdict: not a scenery bug, but a warning that v5 wants a clean install of this package rather than an upgrade over the top. The same thread also captured people arguing about P3D v5's Caribbean water rendering, which is P3D's problem, not FlyTampa's, but it colours a lot of St Maarten screenshots from that era.

The second is copy protection. FlyTampa's anti-piracy measure replaces scenery with grey blocks, and an AVSIM thread from 2012 in which a user reported a "grey wall" at the runway 9 threshold was closed on the spot once a moderator recognised the symptom. If you buy legitimately this never affects you; it is worth knowing that a grey box is a licence problem, not a missing texture.

Beyond those, the package installs into P3D v4 and v5 through FlyTampa's Universal Installer, which always pulls the current build from their server and needs whitelisting in most antivirus software. FS2004, FSX and P3D v3 owners are served by an older, separate installer and the February 2017 FSX/P3Dv3 configurator — another quiet sign of which half of the compatibility list is actually maintained.

Who should buy it

You fly Prepar3D v4 or v5 and you do not own this. Buy it, from FlyTampa direct, and buy the Complete version. It remains one of the best things in that simulator, it costs about the price of a takeaway, and there is no realistic prospect of anything better appearing for a platform Lockheed Martin's customers have largely moved past. This is the profile the review is written for.

You want the Caribbean island-hopping campaign. Buy it. Three airports of escalating difficulty, three islands of photoscenery, animated shipping between them, and a Twin Otter or a Britten-Norman Islander is the single best use anyone has found for this package — a point made independently in 2013, 2019 and 2020 across three different threads.

You already own it and are wondering whether to re-buy for a newer sim. There is nothing to re-buy. Every update since 2008 has been free, and there is no newer version. Run the Universal Installer and you have the current build.

You fly Prepar3D v6. Do not buy it. There is no v6 support, no statement of intent, and FlyTampa's downloads page does not acknowledge that v6 exists. You would be gambling $31 on an unsupported configuration.

You fly MSFS 2020 or 2024. Do not buy it — you cannot use it, and you do not need it. MSFS shipped a handcrafted TNCM and a handcrafted St Barths in the 2020 base simulator, and Airworthy Designs' Saint Martin and Grand Case package covers Princess Juliana plus the French-side field for €15.99, with St Barths available separately. Neither gives you Saba, and neither is FlyTampa. Wait, or make peace with the stock airport.

You are buying on the strength of the store's five-star average. Slow down. simMarket's headline "5" over 35 reviews is a rounding of 32 fives, two fours and one three — a real mean of 4.89, which is still outstanding, but roughly half those reviews were written before 2017 about a simulator generation that has since ended twice.

Where it stands today

The record on this scenery splits cleanly at 2013. Everything raised in the first six years got fixed, usually free, usually fast, and often with FlyTampa's Martin answering in public — including on an AVSIM thread in 2008 where a customer had bought the wrong SKU from simMarket and the developer offered to sort it out personally. Everything raised since 2016 — the Saba runway, the ORBX Vector conflicts, the static beach crowd — is still there. That is not abandonment exactly; v2.0 and v2.1 kept the scenery alive through two Prepar3D generations. It is a product whose maintenance became purely about compatibility and stopped being about the scenery.

That leaves an odd, slightly uncomfortable position on FlyTampa's own shop. Their support page says plainly that "our latest releases will always be of higher quality then our earlier releases", that they mark such products "Legacy Product", and that new customers should "choose from the most recent releases which are being advertised on the main frontpage". St Maarten is on the front page. It is not marked Legacy. And it is priced at $31.00 — identical to Kai Tak V2 and Las Vegas, and more than Athens, Tampa Rebooted, Buffalo or Vienna. By FlyTampa's own stated policy, this product's label and its price no longer match its age. We could not establish whether the scenery has ever been updated to reflect Princess Juliana's post-Hurricane Irma rebuild; no public FlyTampa changelog we found mentions it, and no reviewer raises it either way.

The MSFS question is the one that should decide your purchase, and the answer is a shrug that has lasted six years. FlyTampa previewed St Maarten for MSFS in October 2020, before Amsterdam, before Athens, before Sydney, before Humberside, before three separate Las Vegas releases and an announced Area 51 project. It has never appeared, never been formally cancelled, and never been given a date. FlyTampa did cancel Montreal publicly in August 2023, so they are willing to say so when a project dies; St Maarten has not had even that. If you have been holding out for the modern version, stop holding out. Buy this one if you still fly the sims it runs in, and buy something else if you do not.