FlyTampa Vienna V.2: one SKU, five simulators, and two different airports

On 11 April 2020 a customer called Denzel asked FlyTampa a direct question on their own forum: is a new Vienna coming, because he could not afford both this one and the rival. Martin, the man who built the airport, answered the same night. He could not give a timeframe, he said, but LOWW v4 "has been in the works for a year already so its not that far out."

Six years and four months later there is no v4. There is no Microsoft Flight Simulator Vienna either, and no X-Plane one. What there is, released on 2 July 2026, is a brand-new FlyTampa Vienna for Tower! Simulator 3 — an air traffic control game — at $17.99 on Steam, with Fly Tampa credited as developer on the store page. They rebuilt Vienna. They just did not rebuild it for anyone who wants to land there.

Meanwhile the flight simulator version is still on sale, at €24.00 on simMarket and $24.00 direct, listed against five simulators on one line: FS2004, FSX, P3D v3, P3D v4, P3D v5. That line is the problem this review is about. Those five simulators stopped receiving the same product in November 2015, and nothing on either store page says so.

It is still, in the right sim, a lovely airport. That is what makes the shopping decision so awkward.

Forty-nine sources were read for this review: FlyTampa's own store and support pages, two dozen threads in their Vienna and general forums, both simMarket listings and the two update SKUs, AVSIM, Contrail, Orbx, Steam, the MSFS forums, a 2010 written review and five community videos. Reddit is blocked in this environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; on a fifteen-year-old airport for dead simulators that matters less than it would for a new release, because the forum record is unusually long.

What you are actually buying

There is exactly one FlyTampa Vienna for sale, and it is V.2. Unlike Amsterdam, there is no V1 on the shelf and no arithmetic trap: FlyTampa's own order page lists "FlyTampa-Vienna V2" at $24.00 with no legacy sibling, and a keyword search of simMarket returns three FlyTampa Vienna SKUs and no more.

SKU	Store	Price	Sims
FlyTampa-Vienna V2	flytampa.org (BMT Micro)	$24.00	FS2004, FSX, P3D v3/v4/v5
VIENNA V.2 FS2004 FSX P3D	simMarket	€24.00	as above
VIENNA V.2 UPDATE ONLY FSX P3D	simMarket	€9.00	upgrade from V1
VIENNA V.2 UPDATE ONLY FS2004	simMarket	€9.00	upgrade from V1
LOWW Airport (Tower! Simulator 3)	Steam	$17.99	not a flight simulator

Those two €9.00 update SKUs deserve a warning label they do not have. They went on sale on 25 April 2010, the day after V.2 itself, for people who already owned the original. Their own page shouts "YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE A KEY, YOU MUST ALREADY HAVE YOUR KEY FROM A PREVIOUS DOWNLOAD VERSION" and then "NO REFUNDS!!!". Sixteen years on they sit in the same search results as the full product, €15 cheaper, listing stale requirements — "FSX SP2 DX9 & P3D v2/v3/v4" — for a product that now runs on v5. If you have never owned a FlyTampa Vienna, that is not a cheap way in. It is €9.00 for nothing.

The split nobody mentions on the store page

Here is the thing the listing hides. FlyTampa's last update to the FSX, FS2004 and P3D v3 build of Vienna was version 2.7, announced 3 November 2015. Everything after that went to the Prepar3D v4 branch only: 2.8 in 2018 (recompiled on the v4 SDK, PBR-era ground work, rain and wet FX, dynamic lighting, updated mesh and surrounding photoscenery), 2.9 on 29 April 2018 (SODE jetways, new pavement textures, denser grass), 3.0 on 18 February 2019 (the Universal Installer, and airport lighting that switches itself on in fog), and a 3.1 in use by November 2020.

This is not an inference. Asked on 4 October 2018 whether FSX work would continue, Martin replied on 8 October: "Future updates will probably be for P3Dv4 only." He was right. So the €24.00 buys a 2015 airport or a 2019 one depending on which simulator you own, at one price, from a listing that presents the five as equals.

The product page is more honest than the store is. It flags "SODE and Ctrl-J animated Jetways (P3Dv4 only)", "Pavement wet Weather rain FX (P3Dv4 only)" and "Dynamic Lighting (P3Dv4 only)" in plain sight. It just does not add the sentence that follows from them.

What is in the box

More than the fence line, which is the FlyTampa habit, but less than a city. The package is 363.81MB and covers Schwechat itself plus seasonal mini-photoscenery, autogen and animated highway traffic in the immediate surroundings, along with the OMV refinery that sits under the approach. There is no modelled Vienna city centre. The Danube and the Lobau woods on the promotional shots are the sim's own terrain dressed with FlyTampa's mesh, not bespoke scenery.

Because that photoscenery is there, it fights. A user running Austria Professional and Ultimate Terrain X in July 2013 ended up with two refineries and alternating ground textures; George at FlyTampa suggested deleting FlyTampa's own refinery and added, candidly, "Sadly I doubt it will ever be perfect."

The MSFS question, and P3D v6

There is no FlyTampa Vienna for Microsoft Flight Simulator, in either the 2020 or the 2024 build, and no X-Plane version. A customer asked for an FS24 Vienna on 10 January 2024 and received no reply at all. What covers LOWW in MSFS is Gaya Simulations' Vienna, which Contrail sells at $23.87 with a 5-star rating and which the MSFS forums have discussed since 2020; FlyTampa owners get no discount, no cross-grade and no acknowledgement.

Prepar3D v6 is not supported and never has been formally. On 29 December 2023, George told an owner that "The universal installer should have an option to browse to the P3D Folder. Pick the one with the P3D exe file" — the unofficial workaround. Eight days later, on 6 January 2024, a user named P906 asked in the same thread: "how about LOWW? Does it work in P3Dv6?" Nobody answered. He had already asked in a Vienna thread on 9 July 2023, asked again on 16 July, and returned on 24 April 2024 to write that "it looks like there is nobody from FT anymore present to answer any questions from their customers." The downloads page still badges the Prepar3D Universal Installer P3Dv4 and P3Dv5 only.

One pattern that does not hold: Vienna is not labelled "(Legacy Product)". FlyTampa apply that tag to Amsterdam V1, Corfu, Sydney V1, Copenhagen V1, Grenadines, Montreal V1 and Boston V3 on the same order page, and to three X-Plane titles. Vienna V2 sits with the current products at full price, and its forum section sits above the "Legacy & Discontinued Products" divider, not below it.

What the community consistently praises

Frame rate is the compliment that repeats most, which is not what you expect from an airport this dense. simMarket's reviewers say it in five languages across a decade: "very good vas and fps and a very detailed airport" (May 2016), "stabile Frames" (March 2014), "The scenery highly optimized and performance is on the top" (February 2019), "In P3dV4 stunning! Very good Frame Rates" (January 2018). Martin's own position, offered to a struggling customer on 5 April 2022, is that "Vienna should have higher frames then Amsterdam for sure."

The ground-level clutter is the second. The configurator lets you switch de-icing trucks, snow drift effects, 3D ramp people, animated windsocks and 3D grass on and off individually, which is how the frame rates survive; the 2010 simFlight review already called the taxiway signage "very clear" and the surfaces convincingly asphalt. Later builds added floodlight halo effects and, on P3D v4, dynamic lighting and airport lighting that comes up automatically in fog.

The third is the shape of the place. AVSIM's January 2019 thread is short and unanimous — "an excellent airport and well integrated into the surrounding scenery" — and even the qualifier there is generous: "this is older... as Fly Tampa completes new scenery they get better with each rendition." Vienna's distinctive slab tower, the Skylink pier and the Austrian Technik hangars are all present and all recognisable from the real thing.

And credit where it is genuinely due: FlyTampa modelled Skylink in April 2010. It opened, as Terminal 3, on 5 June 2012. They built a terminal before Vienna finished building it.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The lighting has a long, unresolved tail. Still open. On 25 December 2021 a customer posted a screenshot of broken PAPI textures on P3D v4; on 4 January 2022 a second confirmed the same fault on both v4.5 and v5.3. On 13 June 2022 the original poster returned to write that he was concerned about "the behaviour and approach to the customer from Fly Tampa." No developer reply ever came. On 17 November 2022 another owner reported no runway lights at all in P3D v5.3 after a clean install — taxiway lights fine, runway lights gone. No reply. A simMarket reviewer in April 2022 flagged "issues with light beams from light poles pointing directly horizontal, instead of down." The fog-activated lighting that fixed a 2018 low-visibility complaint shipped in 3.0, on the P3D v4 branch only; if you fly FSX or P3D v3 it never reached you.

Default P3D buildings poke through the scenery. Mitigated, badly. Reported on 23 November 2020 on P3D 5.1, seconded four times within a week. Martin posted a replacement AFCAD on 4 December 2020 with a condition attached: you must first turn off de-icing trucks in the configurator and rename one file to .off. The fix costs you a feature you paid for. It was never folded into the installer — it was still being handed out privately in February 2023, to a customer who had reinstalled everything and could not find it in the forum.

AFCAD and navaid accuracy. Partly fixed, long ago. Versions 2.0 to 2.5 shipped with incorrect ILS frequencies and DME-to-threshold figures; the only fix circulating was a replacement AFCAD written by someone on Aerosoft's forum. Asked directly on 28 June 2015 what 2.6 changed, Martin said "the only Afcad change is the removal of 1 or 2 parking positions." Runway 11 is closed for takeoffs in the shipped AFCAD, which caught out an AVSIM buyer in January 2019 who could not find it in the start-location list.

Jetways. Recurring, environment-dependent. Red-cross jetways on 2.9 in April 2018 (cured by SODE 1.6.2, not by FlyTampa). SODE and default jetways showing simultaneously in January 2021, cured by renaming jetway_lib.bgl by hand. Greyed-out scenery library entries breaking GSX docking in September 2022, cured by hand-editing a <Layer> tag into add-on.xml. Every one of these is fixable. Every one requires a forum thread and a text editor.

The Aerosoft split. Never resolved. Vienna was also published in a boxed Aerosoft edition, and those owners could not buy the €9.00 upgrade. Martin's answer, on 26 June 2010, is worth reading twice: "I cannot legally upgrade an Aerosoft product and take 9Euro for myself, even if the product is originally made by me." Five years later a customer was still stuck on 2.5 through his Aerosoft account while 2.7 shipped elsewhere.

Performance and stability

The record here genuinely splits, and it does not split on hardware.

The majority say it is light. That is the consistent line from the store reviews, from AVSIM, and from FlyTampa themselves. Vienna predates the era of 4K PBR terminals and it shows in the best possible way — the texture budget was trimmed deliberately at 2.6 and 2.7 ("Resaved Textures to save VAS"), and the configurator exists precisely so you can spend frames where you want them.

The minority reports are real and they are unanswered. On 2 March 2017 an owner lost half his frame rate whenever the camera swung towards the C-gates on 2.7; a second owner traced his own version of it to the jetways. On 16 July 2018 a P3D v4.3 user dropped from 40-50 fps to 3-4 on landing and taxi. On 31 March 2021 a man with an RTX 3080 and a 5800X wrote that every other airport he owned ran perfectly and Vienna alone stuttered on approach; that thread has one post in it and no reply. On 30 March 2022 an owner reported terminals failing to load at all and 5-10 fps in a PMDG 737; Martin's suggestions — deactivate the scenery, disable AI — did not help, and the thread ends there.

Read together, the pattern is not "Vienna is heavy." It is that Vienna is light for most people, occasionally pathological for a few, and that after roughly 2021 nobody at FlyTampa was working out which.

Who should buy it

If you fly FS2004, FSX or Prepar3D v3, buy it. There is no payware competitor at LOWW on those platforms — Gaya's Vienna starts at P3D v4, and the only other Vienna products on simMarket are X-Plane city textures and an Austria VFR terrain pack. You will be getting the November 2015 build, frozen, and it is still a better Schwechat than anything else you can install. €24.00 is a lot for eleven-year-old software; it is also the entire market.

If you fly Prepar3D v4 or v5 and you want the best Vienna, buy Gaya's instead. It is PBR, it has modelled terminal interiors, it has been updated within the last few years, and Orbx sell it at AUD 39.95 — which their own converter renders as roughly €24.47, effectively level with FlyTampa's €24.00, though the two are not quoted on the same tax basis and I would not call either one cheaper without checking your own checkout. FlyTampa's Vienna on those sims is the 2019 build with an unresolved PAPI bug and a default-building fix you apply by hand.

If you fly Prepar3D v4 or v5 and you already own other FlyTampa airports, it is a reasonable buy. The Universal Installer handles it, the configurator matches your others, the shared libraries are already installed, and the frame cost will be familiar. This is the profile the product still fits.

If you fly Prepar3D v6, do not buy it expecting support. The browse-to-folder workaround probably works — it is what FlyTampa told a Sydney owner in December 2023 — but the direct question about LOWW specifically was asked twice and answered zero times, and there is no v6 badge anywhere on the downloads page.

If you fly MSFS 2020 or 2024, do not buy this at all, and do not wait for FlyTampa. There is no version, there is no announcement, and the January 2024 request for one went into silence. Buy Gaya's.

If you already own a FlyTampa Vienna, do not touch the €9.00 update SKUs unless you are certain. They are for pre-2010 V1 licences. There are no refunds and the page says so in capitals.

Where it stands today

Vienna is the FlyTampa airport that fell between two eras. It was rebuilt once, properly, in 2010, and modernised carefully through 2015 and again through 2019 — and then a v4 was announced in April 2020 that has never appeared, at exactly the moment the developer's attention moved to Microsoft Flight Simulator, where eleven of their airports now live and Vienna does not.

What is left behind is a good airport in a misleading wrapper. One price, one product row, five simulator badges, and a version history that forked eleven years ago in a forum post most buyers will never read. Nothing on either store page tells an FSX owner he is buying software that stopped changing in 2015, and nothing tells a P3D v6 owner what to expect. The support forum, which AVSIM in 2015 described as "first rate," now has threads about missing runway lights and broken PAPI textures sitting open for years.

And then, on 2 July 2026, a new FlyTampa Vienna arrived — LOWW for Tower! Simulator 3, $17.99, FlyTampa credited as developer. The airport is clearly not forgotten. It has simply been rebuilt for people who watch it rather than fly into it, which is a strange fate for a scenery whose best feature was always what it looked like from the flight deck at dusk.