FSX Jetway Bug

We saw this first a long time ago but it has just come back as a topic for conversation. FSX has nice animated jetways. However sometimes they appear to duplcate and other times just disappear. When designing an enahanced AFD file in FSX the DeleteAllJetways flag is usually set to true. This means that FSX will not read the jetways in the stock file any more but read them from the enhanced or modified AFD. This wil work fine unless an exclusion rectangle set to DeleteAll or DeleteLibraryObjects covers one or more jetways. At this point one of two things can happen. You guessed - either the jetways go or they duplicate. They can go because they are in effect library objects and the exclusion will remove them although it should not. In other cases it seems to reverse the effect of the DeleteAllJetways so duplicates start to appear.

So if you have a problem with jetways behaving this way when modifying and airport check for an exlcusion covering some jetways. The problem is somewhat worse in ADE. Because ADE handles buildings and library objects it creates tiny exclusions for each one. This allows users to just delete or move an object in ADE and the same effect will happen in FSX. ADE uses tiny excludes to make sure that only the stock objects are excluded. The up side of this is that users do not need to create their own exclusions and can move or delete objects individually. The downside is that these excludes are not visible to the user. This is because there can be a lot of them and accidently moving or deleting one will cause the original stock object to reappear and duplicate. We have found that the problem usually arises where a stock object such as a tug or other vehicle is located under or next to an animated jetway. This causes the problem and the best answer is to move the jetway a bit.

Really it is the only answer other than deleting the micro exclude itself. For the expert this is possible but not recommended unless you do know what you are doing. Compile the airport and load it from the bgl file. Micro excludes will now show up. Find the offending micro exclude and delete it. At the same time delete the copy of the object it covered from ADE. Save the project again and compile it. The original object will now show up and you won't be able to delete or ove it any more.

The other caveat is that ADE project files store a lot of information that is not stored in the bgl file. You will lose this when loading from the bgl file. So you may need to put back background image data and some other information. Generally speaking you should never load from and save to a bgl file (as in AFCAD 2 or AFX) this way you will lose project data and also repeated load/saves in the bgl format has been reported as causing positional drift in airport elements.