JFK Airport 1996-1998
Thanks to the New York City government's 'Then and Now' website [link], I discovered 1 ft/pixel resolution full color unnanotated satelite/aerial imagery of the whole city, most interestly to me, JFK Airport. I have fantasized about creating a back-dated version of the airport for my home flight simulator for years. JFK airport is just so strange, interesting, and enigmatic to me. Buildings abandoned after less than a decade of use, hangars demolished to make way for more hangars that inveitably sit unused most of the time, constant redevelopment of an airport that takes up an enormous amount of area compared to the number of operations, the odd-ball terminals that were all outdated within a few years of being built, it's just such a weird place and those trends all seem to be continuting to this day.
The 1990's in particular are the most interesting to me as that was when all of the above quirks were maximally present, with over a dozen nearly or completely abandoned buildings airside and 9 terminals all with their own unique ways of handling and moving passengers, all right on the cusp of major construction projects that would attempt to address these issues but ultimately made things worse in my opinion. It's goofy, it's nonsensical, and I love it.
The NYC government was happy to send me all the high res imagery for free with no more work on my end than to just ask for it! How amazing is that? I've been working with Sketchup and Blender and doing thousands of hours of research (having saved and poured over 3GB worth of several thousand photos) to make a very faithful recreation of this belovedly hated airport, all the way down to getting accurate streetlamps and road-signs where the level of detail is appropriate. The idea is that this scenery will be highly optimized and work in FS2004 with little to no measurabe performance impact on any given modern (i.e. 3GHz+ with a graphics card) system.