First Two Weeks

Two weeks ago, Project Airports was released. I had expected a slow roll out - you lot had other things in mind.

Since then, over 600 pilots have joined, you've claimed land on (almost) every continent, filed bug reports at hours I'd rather not discuss, and asked for things I hadn't thought of and now can't imagine the project without. So here's the two-week version of what happened - the big stuff first, the numbers in the middle, and the small stuff that makes the whole thing nicer to live in at the end.

The catalogue more than doubled.

The Hangar Catalogue went from around ten thousand placeable objects to nearly twenty-five thousand. The bespoke buildings from ninety-plus of the sim's handcrafted airports. The worldwide gliderport structures. Oil rigs. Helipads. The sim's entire modern vehicle fleet - and yes, that includes ready-made parked-car rows and full lots up to 250 cars, placed as a single object, because filling a car park one Corolla at a time is nobody's hobby.

And static aircraft are here: 343 parked planes and helicopters - airliners in real liveries, GA props, gliders - ready to dress your ramps. Nearly everything in the store now has a proper studio thumbnail and a spin-around 3D preview, so you can see exactly what you're buying before you spend a single Aero.

Light up the night

Your airport can now be lit like the real thing. Runway edge and centerline lights, REIL strobes, approach systems from ODALS all the way up to the full ALSF-2 array, blue taxiway edges, apron perimeter lights, a rotating beacon that genuinely rotates.

And runways can carry real approach aids: PAPI lights, and a full CAT I ILS - localizer, glideslope, DME, your own frequency and Morse identifier, your choice of glidepath angle. Tune it on NAV1 and fly the needles down to minimums in weather, exactly like the real-world station it's pretending to be. The frequency picker even keeps you clear of every real ILS within 150 km - all 4,270 of them in the sim's database.

The builder grew up too

The taxiway tool got the full overhaul: drag a midpoint to add a curve, move whole junctions in one piece, save any section of your layout as a reusable piece and stamp it down at your next airport. The snap grid now aligns to your runway instead of the compass, so your hangar rows are actually parallel to the strip. There's a real mobile layout - you can genuinely rough out an airport from your phone. And extra ground areas mean your field can skip across a road or hold a detached corner without stringing aprons together.

The numbers

Two weeks, by the ledger:

• 619 pilots on the field
• 251 airports built, 195 of them published and flyable in MSFS right now
• 2,070 builds through the queue
• 2,459 landings at player fields - plus 707 visits since arriving became the thing that pays
• 1,526 hours flown with the companion connected
• 1,354 objects standing on ramps and fields that were empty ground a fortnight ago
• ~25,000 objects in the catalogue, up from ~10,000 at launch

For a two-week-old project, I'll take it.

The small stuff that makes it nicer

A rapid-fire round, because half of these came straight out of Discord threads:

• Sync got several times faster, and finished builds install themselves - right away if the sim's closed, the moment you close it if not.
• Press Build and watch it live: your place in line, a rough wait, then “built & live” - no refreshing.
• When a build fails, it now tells you why, in plain words, and points you at the fix.
• 24-hour full refunds on anything you buy. Place it, check it in the sim, changed your mind? Every Aero back.
• Water runways don't eat a runway slot anymore.
• Taxi signs and ground text have a Duplicate button. There's a UTC clock in the app. Black ground text paints black.
• A “revert to vanilla” switch: pull an airport out of the sim without deleting it, pop it back whenever.
• Airport codes are unique across the network, real-world-safe, and up to 7 characters.
• The Field Manual covers every tool, every rate, every price.

Most of this list exists because someone said “hey, would it be possible to add....” in Discord. It would. Keep doing that.

See what's been built

Thanks for being here for the messy, fast, occasionally-on-fire first two weeks. The next two are going to be even better.

Can't wait to see your airport on the map.

Cheers,

Justice McCracken | Creator of Project Airports