Vnukovo International Airport UUWW: its best feature is the one X-Plane 12 breaks

Somebody has quietly relit eighteen JustSim airports. His name on the X-Plane.Org forum is F1le, and his files all say the same thing: go into the scenery folder, open objects, swap the light objects for mine, enjoy a bright airport again. Brussels, Barcelona, Nice, Riga, Luxembourg, Malta, Antalya, Rhodes, Chania, Hanover, Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Leipzig, Hamburg, Heraklion, Palma, Basel, Gazipaşa. A second modder, DankestOsprey, got there first on four more and explained why the work was needed at all: JustSim never updated their sceneries for X-Plane 12, so "at every Scenery the Apron is dark at night".

Moscow Vnukovo is not on either list.

That matters more here than it would almost anywhere else in the JustSim catalogue, because the one thing every single source agrees on about UUWW is the night lighting. Stephen Dutton's review for X-Plane Reviews on 12 May 2018 reaches for the word "amazing" at Terminal A after dark, calls the cargo ramp floodlighting first rate, and works his way round the western maintenance aprons noting how good the hangar lighting is. The store's feature list promises "Excellent night effects". Both of the two customer reviews on simMarket are five stars. This is an airport whose reputation was built at dusk, sold to a simulator that renders its lights and to a simulator that does not.

So the question that decides this purchase is not whether the scenery is good. It is good. The question is which X-Plane you are running, and JustSim have answered that question everywhere except here: five of their airports have been rebuilt for X-Plane 12 since May 2025 — Hamburg, Nice, Palma, Innsbruck and Luxembourg — and Vnukovo has been left on the version it shipped with on 5 May 2018.

This review reads 22 sources: both store listings, the developer's back catalogue on two storefronts, the long-form X-Plane Reviews piece and its follow-up comment, the X-Plane.Org forum's community light fixes, the X-Plane Scenery Gateway's own free UUWW, the AVSIM giveaway thread, the trade press from launch week, and the real airport's record. Reddit is blocked in this environment, so the sentiment-at-a-glance reading that normally sits alongside the forum record is missing — assume it, not a thin record, is why no r/flightsim thread appears below.

What you are actually buying

One SKU, one simulator, two shops.

	Where	Price	Notes
This product	simMarket (PID 11731)	€18.90	On sale since 5 May 2018. 819.35 MB. Two customer reviews, both five stars
This product	X-Plane.Org Store (JustSim-UUWW)	US$20.90	Requirements read "X-Plane 11+". Version field reads "Current Version : 1.2 (June 1st 2018)". No customer reviews
Sibling	simMarket, P3Dv4 build	€18.90-ish, separate SKU	Different product, reviewed separately
Sibling	simMarket, MSFS build	€20.90	Maintained to v1.2.0; not compatible with X-Plane
Free rival	X-Plane Scenery Gateway, UUWW	Free, in the box	3D pack, nine approved submissions, currently recommended pack 85098
Adjacent	Drzewiecki Design Moscow City XP, simMarket	€25.00	Includes a lite UUWW. X-Plane 10/11 only, on sale since 22 September 2016

JustSim run no storefront of their own. justsim.net, justsim.org, justsim.eu and justsim.info return NXDOMAIN; justsim.ru has no A record; justsim.com resolves but lands on an unrelated commercial site with nothing to do with flight simulation. simMarket's page lists JUSTSIM as both publisher and seller. So there is no developer price to check the store price against — but there is a second shop, and the two do not quite agree. simMarket's own currency switcher renders €18.90 at roughly US$22, against US$20.90 on the X-Plane.Org Store. Before you conclude the .Org is cheaper, read simMarket's terms: clause 1.5 says "All prices stated on SIMMARKET include the respectively applicable value added tax", and what is applicable to you depends on where you are and whether your session has resolved a rate at all. The honest statement is that the two prices are close and the tax treatment differs, so check your own basket.

The €18.90 is worth holding next to one other number. JustSim's Palma de Mallorca for X-Plane 12 went on sale on 15 November 2025, built for the current simulator with PBR ground materials and native XP12 lighting, and it costs exactly €18.90 too.

What is in the box

Custom terminals A and B, the concourse, the DoubleTree Hilton, the cargo and mail terminal, the Vnukovo 2 government apron with its VIP pavilion and waiting IL-96, the Vnukovo 3 and Vnukovo 5 aprons, the maintenance hangars along 01/19, the gas power station, the Tu-104 gate guardian, and a large stretch of landside housing and freight depots. Animated jetways run on Marginal's AutoGate. WorldTraffic 3 ground routes are supplied pre-built rather than generated, which Dutton singled out for praise. There is also a "New exclusive feature: Rain effects on ground" that requires the xEnviro plugin at v1.08 or higher.

What the community consistently praises

The airside modelling and its integration with the city. This is the finding that carries across every source that has actually flown it. Dutton's approach into RWY 01 over the Kiev Highway, the RAIL lighting sitting in the road, the wear patterns where 06/24 and 01/19 cross — he describes an airport that does not announce itself from ten miles out, which is exactly the compliment an airport designer wants. JustSim built it specifically to sit inside Drzewiecki Design's Moscow City XP, replacing that package's lite UUWW cleanly if you get the scenery order right. Getting two studios' work to merge into one continuous cityscape is rarer than it sounds, and it is the reason this scenery was talked about at all in 2018.

The night lighting, on X-Plane 11. Terminal A after dark is the set piece. The ramps are lit well enough to work a turnaround on, the cargo apron floodlighting is repeatedly called first rate, and the hangar lighting on the western side gets its own paragraph. The one documented miss is the DoubleTree Hilton, which sits unlit — and was still unlit after the v1.2 update, which Dutton pointedly noted at the time and which has never been fixed.

Frame rate. Both simMarket reviewers volunteer it unprompted within twenty-four hours of release: Ivan on 5 May 2018 ("Excellent scenery! Very high detail and quality, performance"), Dmitry on 6 May 2018 ("Performance is high, very high quality work"). Dutton calls the scenery "very refined framerate wise" on its own. The caveat is texture memory rather than frames, and it only appears when you stack UUWW under the full Moscow City XP: at maximum texture quality he overloaded an 8 GB GTX 1080 and had to drop a notch to High.

The bits nobody had to build. Pre-tested WorldTraffic 3 ground routes shipped in a folder ready to drop in. Gate 30 deliberately left non-functional because nothing that fits the stand would fit the stand. Oversized gate numbers on the airbridge fascias so you can find your stand from the taxiway. Small decisions, and they read as a studio that flew its own airport.

It still runs. The most recent voice on the record is a comment left under Dutton's review on 13 August 2023 by a user who flies Istanbul–Vnukovo on Turkish: the scenery "feels so authentic", AutoGate works, and the only complaint is that Domodedovo has nothing of this quality. That is five years after release, and it is the last thing anybody said about this product in public.

What keeps coming up as a problem

No X-Plane 12 build. Still open, and the gap is now structural. The X-Plane.Org Store's JustSim catalogue makes this unusually easy to verify: EDDH, ELLX, LEPA, LFMN and LOWI each appear twice, once tagged XP11 and once XP12. UUWW appears once, untagged, with no sibling. X-Plane Reviews dates those conversions precisely — Hamburg reviewed 6 May 2025, Nice announced 15 August and reviewed 29 August 2025, Palma 17 November 2025, Innsbruck 29 May 2026, Luxembourg 5 June 2026. Five airports in thirteen months, and Moscow is not one of them.

The aprons go dark in X-Plane 12. Still open, with no fix for this airport. JustSim's X-Plane 11 apron light objects do not render under X-Plane 12's lighting model. Two community modders have patched this for roughly twenty JustSim airports between them — F1le's eighteen and DankestOsprey's four — by substituting X-Plane 12's default light objects. Neither has done UUWW. So the single most praised quality of this scenery is the single quality that fails on the simulator most X-Plane users now run, and unlike Nice or Luxembourg there is no volunteer patch waiting for you. DankestOsprey's file description carries the community's read on why: "Justsim does not react to any bug reports."

The animated jetways now depend on a fork. Mitigated, by someone else. The jetways are built on Marginal's AutoGate, which was abandoned in 2017 at v1.72. A fork by hotbso exists specifically, in its own words, to make it "usable on XP12", and that is what the 2023 commenter above was running. It works. It is also a third-party rescue of a third-party dependency, five years after the original author walked away, and JustSim have contributed nothing to it.

The "exclusive" rain feature is dead on the current simulator. Still open. The ground rain effect is not a native feature — the store says the "Effect will be controlled by xEnviro v1.08 (and higher) plugin". Dutton found it "not yet functional" in May 2018. X-Plane Reviews later reported xEnviro's own developers stating the plugin "will not be compatible with X-Plane 12" and that future updates would be X-Plane 11 only. A feature that needed a plugin, that did not work at launch, and whose plugin has since declined the current simulator.

Landside is the compromise. Unchanged since 2018. The store sells "Custom surroundings". Dutton is direct about what that means: the ground textures away from the apron are "not photographic", grainy at eye level, with roads that in places do not join up or are not visible at all. He is equally direct that this is the trade that paid for the frame rate, and that from the air you will not care. Both statements are true; which one you weight depends on whether you taxi or fly.

The store copy describes an airport that no longer exists. Still open, and worse now than at launch. The simMarket description tells you that "In 2015, the airport handled 15.82 million passengers", and that Terminal B, opened April 2004, "currently handles international passengers". Terminal B's flights were moved into Terminal A in the summer of 2016; Terminals B and D have been out of service since October 2017 — seven months before this scenery went on sale. The copy also predates the airport's 2019 renaming after the designer Andrei Tupolev. The X-Plane.Org Store carries a trimmed version of the same text: the Terminal B paragraph is gone, the 2015 passenger figure is not.

The real airport has moved a long way from 2018

This is an accuracy point, not a political one, and a buyer should have it. Vnukovo carried 24.0 million passengers in 2019, its peak. Traffic fell to 12.6 million in 2020, recovered to 18.0 million in 2021, then dropped again after 2022 — 16.4 million that year, 14.5 million in 2023, about 16.0 million in 2024 — and the airport slid to around thirtieth in Europe on the back of sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine. What changed for a simmer is the ramp: the international network is now weighted heavily towards Turkey, Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East, and the liveries and fleets you would park at these gates today are not the ones a 2018 scenery was designed around. The buildings are still the buildings. The airport around them is not the airport this was built to depict, and nothing in eight years has been adjusted for it.

Performance and stability

Nothing in the record suggests this scenery is fragile. There are no crash reports, no loading failures, no complaints of conflicts with other add-ons in any source found. Performance is the product's second-best quality after the lighting: two same-week store reviewers, a long-form reviewer on 2018-era hardware, and a 2023 commenter all report it costing them little. The 819 MB download unpacks to about 1.9 GB in Custom Scenery.

The one measurable constraint is VRAM, and it is a stacking problem rather than a defect. Running UUWW, Moscow City XP and Sheremetyevo XP together at maximum texture quality pushed past 8 GB on Dutton's card and produced stutters that object-count reductions did not cure; dropping to High texture quality fixed it at a small cost in sharpness. On a modern card that constraint has largely evaporated.

Installation has one real trap, unchanged since launch: the JustSim folder must load before Drzewiecki's Moscow packages in scenery_packs.ini, which is why the folder ships named 1_UUWW_JustSim. Keep the prefix. If you delete it you will be looking at the lite UUWW you already owned.

Who should buy it

If you still fly X-Plane 11 and Moscow is a destination you use — buy it. This is the profile the scenery was built for and it has never stopped being right for them. At €18.90 you get a large, dense, beautifully lit airport that merges into the best city scenery X-Plane 11 has, with the ground routes done for you. Nothing about it has aged badly on the simulator it was written for.

If you own Drzewiecki's Moscow City XP and are on X-Plane 11 — buy it, and expect the biggest jump of anyone. The lite UUWW in Moscow City XP is competent; this replaces it with a fully modelled airport designed to sit in the same landscape. This is the pairing every source recommends.

If you are on X-Plane 12 — do not buy it. This is the profile the review exists to warn. You would be paying full 2026 money for an X-Plane 11 airport whose defining feature is broken on your simulator, whose jetway plugin needs a community fork, whose "exclusive" weather feature depends on a plugin that has declined X-Plane 12, and for which — uniquely among JustSim's popular airports — nobody has published a light fix. The same €18.90 buys their Palma or Innsbruck built natively for the simulator you actually run.

If you fly to Moscow occasionally and mainly from the air — take the free one first. X-Plane 12 ships a Gateway UUWW: a 3D pack with nine approved submissions behind it, worked on by Rbrown222 in 2017, rebuilt by Litjan in August 2017, extended by Kareem in February 2018 and by Dzennross in June 2021, and currently sitting on pack 85098 approved 21 June 2021. It is library objects and generic buildings, and it is nowhere near this — but it is there, it is lit correctly in X-Plane 12, and for an overflight or a single arrival a month it may be all you need. A further submission in April 2026 was declined, so it is not a moving target either.

If you were waiting for the X-Plane 12 version — do not pre-emptively buy this one. JustSim charge for their conversions: Hamburg's XP12 build offered XP11 owners 40% off, Palma's carries an €8.00 upgrade price on simMarket. Buying the XP11 build today in the hope of a cheap upgrade is a bet on a conversion that has not been announced, on an airport that has been skipped five times running.

Where it stands today

The strange thing about this product is how little there is to argue with. There is no controversy, no botched update, no unanswered support thread, no reviewer who hated it. There is one long, admiring review from May 2018, two five-star customer notes from release week, a giveaway on simMarket that ended on 30 March 2020 and put the scenery into a lot of hangars for free, and then eight years of nothing at all. The last public word about it is a friendly comment in August 2023 from someone who was homesick.

What has changed is everything around it. X-Plane 12 arrived and stopped drawing the lights. Marginal stopped maintaining the plugin the jetways run on, and a stranger picked it up. xEnviro declined the new simulator, taking the "exclusive" rain effect with it. JustSim started a serious X-Plane 12 conversion programme in May 2025 and worked through Hamburg, Nice, Palma, Innsbruck and Luxembourg without looking at Moscow. Two volunteers relit twenty of the studio's airports and skipped this one. And the real Vnukovo — renamed, down to two working terminals out of three since before the scenery shipped, and flying a materially different route network than it did in 2018 — kept moving while the store page went on quoting its 2015 passenger figures.

So the score splits, and I have let it. On X-Plane 11 this is a 4.3 airport that has held its value for eight years. On X-Plane 12 it is a 2, and the headline 3.0 is the honest average of two very different purchases sold as one. The version field on the X-Plane.Org Store still reads 1.2, dated 1 June 2018, and it is the most accurate sentence on either listing.