A few years ago I took my gliding lessons in the beautiful “Berner Oberland”, in Thun to be exact. Thun Airfield (ICAO code LSZW) is a little grass strip right in front of the Swiss Alps. Since I also fly alot in my home flight simulator I wanted to be able to fly in Thun aswell, especially after the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 which was a whole new experience for VFR flying with all it’s satellite imagery.

Unfortunately the default rendition of the airfield is not very nice and no one created the field yet. So I started to get into scenery development and 3D modelling to do it myself. I wasn’t really succesful with 3D modelling on my own but got help from a friend who created the models. I took reference pictres, did the PBR texturing and created the project in the simulator. In January 2021, after many sleepless nights and hundreds of hours of tweaking the scenery in the simulator, I was finally able to release the scenery to the public. I published it on flightsim.to since I wanted everyone to enjoy it if they want to. I did not want any money for it because it was mainly a project for myself, but why not let others have fun with it too.

The scenery was even featured on FSElite and Threshold!

Here are a few images of the development process.

X-Plane Version

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Since I left Microsoft Windows and fully switched to Linux I also started to use X-Plane 12 a lot more and it quickly became my main flight simulator. So I did a big update with new textures and details and made a version for X-Plane 12 too. It’s been released on the X-Plane.org Forums

What’s next?

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In the future I will update the MSFS 2020 version too with the new textures. I also plan to make sure the scenery will be compatible with MSFS 2024. But since I mainly use X-Plane now and I am not really flying alot in MSFS it’s currently not a top priority for me.