UUWW Moscow Vnukovo: a five-star page whose newest review is from April 2020

Sixteen people have reviewed JustSim's Vnukovo on simMarket. Fourteen gave it five stars, two gave it four, and the page rounds that to a clean 5. It works out at 4.88. But the useful number is not the average — it is the date. Nine of the sixteen reviews were written in May 2018, in the fortnight after release. One arrived in September 2019. Four more landed between 24 March and 1 April 2020, and four of those four open by thanking JustSim for giving the airport away free. Nobody has reviewed it since 1 April 2020. Six years and four months of silence sit under that five-star badge.

That is not a scandal. It is what a store page looks like when a product stops being bought and stops being patched, and the record around it says the same thing in every direction. JustSim are alive and busy — they put Düsseldorf NG out for MSFS 2024 on 19 August 2026, the day before this was written. They were still converting old airports to Prepar3D v5 as late as 15 June 2023, when Oslo Gardermoen got the treatment. Vnukovo never did. The SKU still says P3DV4, the requirements still say "Lockheed Martin Prepar3D V4.X", and the price is still the €20.90 it was on 27 April 2018.

Meanwhile the airport moved. Vnukovo was formally renamed after the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev in 2019, a year after this scenery shipped. Terminals B and D — which the store copy on this very page still describes as handling international passengers — had their flights transferred into Terminal A in the summer of 2016 and have been out of service since October 2017, six months before release. The product blurb quotes passenger figures from 2015. This is a scenery of a real place, sold in 2026, describing itself with numbers from eleven years ago.

None of which makes the modelling bad. It is not bad. Stephen Dutton at X-Plane Reviews spent several thousand words on the sibling X-Plane build in May 2018 and came away calling the night lighting "sensational", and every one of the sixteen store reviews that bothers to mention frame rate says the same thing: it costs almost nothing to run. This is a good airport that has been frozen since the year it was made, on a simulator version its own developer has moved past, at a price that has not moved either.

This review reads 21 sources: three simMarket store listings and the publisher index, four trade-press release and status articles, three AVSIM threads, an official MSFS forums support thread, a long written scenery review, a video review, a community enhancement mod, a price-comparison listing and the real airport's own record. Reddit is structurally unavailable in this environment, so the sentiment-at-a-glance read that would normally cross-check a store rating this lopsided is missing here — worth stating plainly, because on a product whose entire public rating rests on sixteen store reviews, that absence matters more than usual.

What you are actually buying

There are three separate Vnukovos from JustSim on simMarket, and they are three separate purchases. Nothing upgrades into anything else.

SKU	Sim	On sale since	Size	Price	Store rating
UUWW Moscow Vnukovo P3DV4	Prepar3D v4.x only	27 Apr 2018	1.98 GB	€20.90	5 (16 reviews: 14×5, 2×4 — true mean 4.88)
Vnukovo UUWW X-Plane 11	X-Plane 11	5 May 2018	819 MB	€18.90	5 (2 reviews)
UUWW Vnukovo MSFS	MSFS 2020 native, MSFS 2024 compatible, v1.2	29 May 2021	1.18 GB	€20.90	4 (2 reviews)

The P3D SKU is the subject here, and the important word in its name is the last one. There is no Prepar3D v5 version and no v6 version. JustSim's own P3D v5 policy, stated by company head Andrei Bakanov and reported by FSNews on 18 April 2020, was that a handful of airports — Santorini, Gazipasa, Brussels, Palma — would get free v5 updates and the rest would need a "symbolic" €5 upgrade. Vnukovo appeared on neither list then and has appeared on neither since. AVSIM's Prepar3D forum has the practical answer instead: JustSim's v4 sceneries generally load into v5 if you install them by hand with an add-on organiser, sometimes needing a third-party exclusion file, and you are on your own if they do not.

On price, be careful about cross-store arithmetic. simMarket's terms state, at clause 1.5, that "All prices stated on SIMMARKET include the respectively applicable value added tax" — so a €20.90 shown to an unresolved browser session is a 0% VAT figure, and a European buyer will see a different one at checkout. There is no JustSim storefront to compare it against: the developer's own domain, justsim.me, does not resolve at all as of 20 August 2026, so simMarket is effectively the only place this SKU exists. For the MSFS sibling, FS Addon Compare shows the in-sim Marketplace listing at $18.49 against simMarket's $24.35 equivalent — but that is a different product for a different simulator, and it is not evidence about this one.

Credit where it is due, too: this is not a solo JustSim scenery. FSElite reported on 21 April 2018 that JustSim had "been collaborating with Eugene Baturin from Digital Design and Drzewiecki Designs" on it, the product cover art carries both the JustSim logo and the Digital Design name, and reviewer Zsolt named it on 4 May 2018 as "a joint effort between Justsim and Digital Design". The store credits JustSim alone.

What the community consistently praises

The night lighting, first and by a distance. It is the one thing that shows up in nearly every source. Dutton's X-Plane Reviews piece uses "amazing", "stunning" and "sensational" about three different parts of the airport after dark, and singles out the ramp lighting as genuinely good to work under during a night turnaround. Alexander, 25 July 2018: "Dynamic lightning looks amazing in nighttime and has no performance loss". Aleksej, 7 May 2018: "Night lighting, shadows - best of the best!" Dieter, who deducted a star, still opened with the dynamic lighting working well. Eight years on, the apron lighting is the reason to own this.

Performance, and it is not close either. Nine separate store reviewers volunteer that it costs them nothing. Aleksej reported 50–60 fps in a PMDG virtual cockpit with traffic on an 8600K and a GTX 1070, dropping to 40–50 at night with dynamic lighting on. Igor: "no FPS impact". Morten: "Intelligent balance between detail/fps". Dutton found it "very refined framerate wise" on its own. The only caveat anyone raises is texture memory when you stack it under a full Moscow city scenery, which is a stacking problem rather than this scenery's.

Terminal A and the airside detail. The main terminal's saucer roof and glazing is what the screenshots sell and what reviewers keep coming back to. Aro, 31 May 2018: "the gates have transparent walls and some interior is visible". Dutton praised the oversized gate numbering as an actual navigational aid on a large and confusing apron, and rated the aircraft-bay clutter dense enough to look lived-in without blocking ground handling. The 3D grass gets named by four different reviewers unprompted.

Integration with what was around it. Aleksey, 8 May 2018, on ORBX: "perfect compatibility with FTX Global (I did not find the transition boundary)". Aro found it blended cleanly with Drzewiecki Design's Moscow City X. That was a deliberate design goal, and it worked — Dutton devoted a chunk of his summary to the fact that two unrelated developers' sceneries meshed into one continuous Moscow rather than a patchwork, which was not a given in 2018.

Price against quality, at 2018 prices. Andrea, Krzysztof and Zsolt all reach for the same argument: for the money this was an unusual amount of airport. Krzysztof, 31 January 2020: "I give it 5 stars for value of cost and the quality received." That verdict was fair when it was written. Whether it survives to 2026 is a different question, and the answer is below.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The surroundings, and this is the oldest complaint on the record. Dieter's four-star review of 16 September 2019 is blunt about it: he takes a star off for the area around the airport, asks what it is even supposed to be, and calls it painted scenery with a few houses and very poor graphics — adding that a 2018 product ought to offer considerably more outside the fence. Dutton, independently and a year earlier, reached the same place from the other side: the landside ground textures are not photographic, they are grainy at ground level, and in places the roads do not visibly join up. Two credible sources, fourteen months apart, on the same weakness. Status: still open. No update has ever addressed it.

The GSX and SODE conflict. Adam, 1 April 2020, four stars: after installing this airport his jetways were inoperable, and uninstalling it put everything back. That is a report of a scenery breaking jetway functionality beyond its own boundary, which is the most serious thing anyone has said about this product. It is a single report, so by this site's own standard it is not yet a finding — but it is the last substantive thing written about the scenery by a customer, there is no developer reply anywhere, and there is no subsequent update in which it could have been fixed. Status: still open, and unconfirmed. If you run GSX Pro, treat this as a real risk and keep the uninstaller handy.

Jetways and the docking system were not in the box at launch. FSElite's release article of 28 April 2018 lists the VDGS and the animated SODE jetways as coming "in 2-3 weeks". Zsolt's 4 May review says the same: "SODE jetways are not yet supported but worry you not, Justsim confirmed SODE jetways are coming within a few weeks". They arrived — Dutton's updated review confirms working airbridges and ramp marshallers in v1.2 — so this one has a happy ending. Status: fixed, mid-2018. It is listed on the store page as a present-tense feature today, which is now correct.

Small modelling misses that were flagged and never picked up. The DoubleTree Hilton behind Terminal B has no lit textures and sits dark at night; Dutton flagged it in the original review, expected v1.2 to fix it, and reported that v1.2 did not. Gate 30 is deliberately non-functional because the bay is too tight for anything airliner-sized. Status: still open.

Installation friction outside the sim root. An AVSIM Prepar3D thread from 8 April 2020 has a buyer getting no autogen trees at all after installing UUWW via Lorby's Add-On Organiser, with the fix turning out to be a hand-written add-on.xml plus remembering to place the SODE files. Another poster identified a wider autogen bug from an unrelated giveaway scenery as a possible culprit. Status: mitigated — the community solved it, the developer did not.

And then there is the airport itself. This is the part that has changed most since 2018, and it is an accuracy question rather than a political one. Vnukovo was renamed Vnukovo Andrei Tupolev International in 2019 under the national "Great Names of Russia" naming programme — after this scenery was built, so nothing in it reflects that. Terminals B and D, which the scenery models and the store copy describes as live international facilities, have been out of service since October 2017. And the traffic picture a 2018 AFCAD and a 2018 set of static aircraft encode — which carriers park where, which liveries fill the ramp, which international destinations the boards show — is a snapshot of Russian civil aviation as it was before 2022. Fleets, liveries and international networks at Moscow airports have changed materially since then. A buyer flying in today gets accurate runways, taxiways, terminal geometry and lighting, and an airline mix that is a period piece. That is exactly the same kind of staleness as an out-of-date terminal building, and it should be priced the same way.

Worth knowing about the sibling. JustSim's MSFS Vnukovo carries a 3.81 out of 5 across 40 ratings on FS Addon Compare. That is a bigger and considerably more honest sample than sixteen store reviews, nine of them from launch fortnight, and it is a better guide to what this model set actually is than the 5 badge on the P3D page.

Performance and stability

There is no performance story here, which is the compliment. Across nine store reviews, one long written review and a video walk-through, nobody reports a frame-rate problem, and several report measurably good numbers on 2018 hardware. Dynamic lighting — the feature most likely to cost you frames in P3D v4 — is repeatedly described as free. On a modern machine running v4 this will not be your bottleneck.

Stability is a thinner record, and thin in a specific way: there are no crash reports because there is almost no recent usage. The one behavioural complaint on file is Adam's GSX/SODE jetway conflict from April 2020, unanswered and unfixed. The install-time autogen issue from the same month is solvable but was solved by other customers rather than by support.

The Prepar3D v5 and v6 question is the one that will actually decide this purchase. There is no v5 SKU and no v6 SKU. AVSIM's Prepar3D forum reports that JustSim's v4 airports mostly load into v5 when installed manually — one poster simply renamed his v5 root folder to v4, ran the installers, renamed it back, and added everything through Lorby's organiser — with the caveat that some need exclusion files and some show "optical flaws". That is a community workaround, not support, and if it goes wrong there is nobody to ask: JustSim's own website does not resolve, there is no developer support forum, and the last documented developer response to any customer problem is from the MSFS forums in January 2025, where a user reported that JustSim told him "they will contact Microsoft" about streamed airports failing to load in MSFS 2024. That thread was still unresolved in April 2025, with one poster wondering aloud whether JustSim had given up on their back catalogue entirely. Given EDDL NG shipped last week, they clearly have not given up on the company. The back catalogue is another matter.

Who should buy it

The Prepar3D v4 flyer who wants a Moscow destination — buy it. This is the whole case for the product and it is a strong one. You are getting a genuinely excellent airport with best-in-its-generation night lighting for almost no frame cost, on a platform where nothing better for UUWW exists and nothing new is coming. €20.90 is a lot for a 2018 build, but there is no alternative and no discount to wait for.

The Prepar3D v5 or v6 flyer — buy it only with your eyes open. It will very probably work. It is not supported, it was never certified for your sim, and the fix if it misbehaves is a forum thread from 2020 and your own patience. Budget an evening. If that sounds like a chore rather than a hobby, skip it.

The MSFS 2020 or 2024 pilot — do not buy this SKU. Buy the MSFS one instead. Same price, native to your sim, last updated to v1.2 in July 2024, and one of its two reviewers specifically credits "regular updates to keep up with the real world". Know that its wider rating is 3.81, and that a community enhancement mod on flightsim.to — updated 1 May 2026 — exists to add the illumination, mast hazard lighting and ground clutter the base product still lacks.

The X-Plane pilot — do not buy this SKU either. The X-Plane 11 build is a separate €18.90 purchase and is the one Stephen Dutton actually reviewed. It is X-Plane 11 only; JustSim have not brought Vnukovo to X-Plane 12, despite doing exactly that for Nice, Luxembourg, Innsbruck, Palma and Hamburg.

The buyer who wants a current, accurate Vnukovo — do not buy any of them. The geometry is right and the terminals are right, but the name on the building predates the 2019 rename, two modelled terminals have been shut since 2017, and the traffic and liveries are a 2018 snapshot of an aviation market that has changed substantially since. If matching the real airport as it is this month is the point of the purchase, no product currently does that.

Where it stands today

The honest summary is that this is a 3.3 product wearing a 4.88 store average, and both numbers are correct about different moments. In May 2018 the enthusiasm on that page was earned: JustSim and Digital Design had built the best Vnukovo anyone had, on the newest simulator platform going, and priced it below what a German or Spanish airport of the same quality was fetching. Zsolt called it "what a scenery should look like in 2018". He was right, and that is the problem — it is still exactly what a scenery looked like in 2018.

What has changed is everything around it. Prepar3D moved to v5 and then v6, and this SKU stayed on v4 while JustSim converted other airports as recently as June 2023. The developer's own website went off the air. The customer record stopped dead on 1 April 2020, at the end of a giveaway. The airport was renamed, its store description went stale, and Russian civil aviation reorganised in ways that make a 2018 ramp a period piece. And the same model set now exists for MSFS at the same money with a maintained version number and a considerably more sceptical rating from four times as many people.

The headline score sits a fraction below the mean of the breakdown, and the reason is that the two low areas — platform support and value — are the ones a 2026 buyer actually transacts on. You cannot enjoy the night lighting on a simulator the file will not install into, and €20.90 unchanged in eight years is a real number, not a rounding error. If you are on v4, none of that reaches you and the score effectively reads a point higher. If you are anywhere else, it is the whole story.