DeltaVII

If you want realistic taxiing, go to your nearest airport(s) (maybe LAX, maybe SNA, maybe SAN) with a stopwatch and a radio receiver, tune the latter into the ground frequency that handles the taxiway in front of you and meter the time aircraft need to taxi over a distance between two defined points that you can measure via Google Maps, for example. That being said, not every aircraft having the same taxi speed might be a good idea for realism.

Right at this moment, planes are landing on 16C.

And I was out again at HAM / EDDH. Nice day, 35° C (95° F), and a friend of mine and his family returned from vacation in Greece. Unfortunately, the tower decided to make a runway change just five fricking minutes before the landing, leaving me stunned when this Cessna 680A Citation Latitude operated by NetJets Europe (callsign "Fraction") under flight number NJE731R coming from St. Gallen (ACH / LSZR) in Switzerland landed on runway 15 and a single-prop plane departed on runway 33 immediately after the Citation had evacuated the runway... So, standing some 3,000 ft from the threshold of runway 15 when the aircraft with my friend in it landed on runway 23 left me some 6,000 ft away from the action. I was not happy and didn't even catch the touchdown. Don't be surprised about the blurry picture of the Aegean Airlines Airbus A320 (SX-DVS) with flight number A3508 / AEE508 approaching HAM from Thessaloniki (SKG / LGTS) - that's not a crappy camera, it's the heat. And my friend described approach and landing as "bumpy", which makes sense when you remember that the hot air goes up and causes air pressure to change quickly. At least, I caught these two buddies: An Eurowings A319, registration OE-LYV, coming in from Salzburg (SZG / LOWS) on flight EW4344 / EWG4344 in front of it's younger, yet super-heavy brother, the Emirates A380, registration A6-EUC, lined up and waiting on runway 33 for it's flight EK60 / UAE60 back to Dubai (DXB / OMDB). The latter had two turns to Hamburg in the last three days with 48 hours on the ground at Dubai inbetween and, as I'm writing this, is serving flight EK7 / UAE7 to Heathrow. Isn't it beautiful, yet kind of brutal, how much thrust these engines produce? It amazes me every single time... And while a thunderstorm approached the area to cool us down from 35° C to 21° C (70° F) within an hour, these two low-costers met at the runway crossing for the last picture of the day: the pilots of Pegasus Airlines flight PC1045 / PGT1045 from Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen airport (SAW / LTFJ - named after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's adopted daughter who was the world's first female combat pilot!) in a 10-year-old Boeing 737-800 named "Maya" touched down right on the 1,000-foot marker while the pilots of Vueling flight VY1821 / VLG4YQ sat in their less than three-year-old Airbus A320neo (EC-NEA) waiting for their departure clearance to Barcelona (BCN / LEBL). But however unfortunate that runway change was: I had to give it to the ATCs that the wind had definitely changed, now coming from the north, and made it necessary to switch from a configuration with departures on 23 and arrivals on 15 to departures on 33 and arrivals on 23. Safety first!

What you could do is pull the same schedule from FlightAware (where you also get the regional flight numbers as the carriers' flight numbers instead of the network (DAL5199 from JFK to BWI is actually EDV5199, for instance) and compare ETD/ETA with ATD/ATA. That way, you also avoid a lot of white planes. And where data are missing, Flightera.net (careful - they have request limits!) and radarbox.com might be helpful.

True - but at least Skywest shared the ramp with United in the original version, so...

The problem is: SkyWest operates the flights for all three in and out of LAX, with the only difference being the first digit of the flight number referencing the network. And there's no way to solve this in Tower!3D. AA6278/SKW6278 ABQ-LAX DL4012/SKW4012 SLC-LAX UA5426/SKW5426 FAL-LAX When Real Traffic came out, it used to be Envoy Air and Republic Airways for American Eagle, SkyWest for United Express and Compass Airlines for Delta Connection, but back then Virgin America was still around, so...

RW is Republic's American Eagle livery, YX is Republic's own generic livery (if you have newer airports' Real Color packs; up until DFW, it was an American Eagle livery, too). There is no Delta Connection livery for Republic. You can find all the liveries and codes in the Master List by @Pedantic G here:

Windows has built-in ZIP archive support. No need for WinZip.

Right there:

Tower!3D is like Whose Line... 😉

Simple answer: They bought worldwide schedules including licences for redistribution as Real Traffic once, before Tower!3D came out, at what you would consider horrible cost that you only stomach once. Whatever the volume was, at that time, worldwide, that was the volume that went into Real Traffic. And ZBAD wasn't even around at that time. Buying those data once is definitely cheaper and better to calculate with than buying the data for one airport at a time around the time it comes out. First and foremost: You as a developer have no idea whether your data source will be available at all at the time you publish an add-on, up to six years in the future, and you would have to buy them for a third-party developer publishing a new airport on their own. Microsoft can secure availability just by buying a company providing the necessary data. They would buy FlightAware, Flightradar24, AirNav Systems (Radarbox) or any other company in that field just for shits and giggles, if it safely provided them with the data they need. Do you think that FeelThere could go the same way when FlightAware was just sold half a year ago to Collins Aerospace in a multi-million dollar deal? You want real-time traffic like Microsoft FS2020? Then don't complain when the base game already costs US$ 300-500. Or accept that things are the way they are and be grateful that there are people out here who update your $9.99 once-and-for-all-times Real Traffic purchase with real data at no additional cost at all for most of the airports (and maybe ask nicely, if anyone has a schedule he/she/diverse would be willing to share for an airport that's not in the list that @pete_agreatguy provided)... Ooooooor you could kick-start your own software company and make a better product on your own? 🤔 Sincerely, a software developer (not affiliated with FeelThere)

On the other side, I discovered this Bombardier Challenger 300 (well known in Tower!3D by its IATA code "CL3"). It had just landed landed on runway 33 (a very rare occasion, for noise abatement reasons!) and turned from taxiway E1 onto runway 23. Turned out that runway 23 was inactive due to wind. I checked the METAR: EDDH 191420Z 31015KT 9999 BKN022 08/04 Q1022 TEMPO 30015G25KT We had 15 knots coming out of 310 degrees, temporarily even gusts of 25 knots, which is why using runway 33 as the only active runway definitely made sense. And on a December sunday afternoon, this really doesn't turn out problematic in any way. By the way: The aircraft with that funny tail number belongs to Windrose Air Jet Charter in Berlin and is one of three Challengers in their fleet. Another one, D-BUBI, is also a regular customer in Hamburg. And then, of course, there was my big friend: 7-year-old Emirates Airbus A380-861, registered A6-EOE. This year, it flies with a special livery honoring 50 years of the United Arab Emirates' independence from the United Kingdom which formally happened on December 7, 1972. The livery is called "Year of the Fiftieth". My buddy was not the reason to come to the airport, but as always it was a nice-to-have. The dimensions still amaze me. Just look how tiny the ramp agent looks compared to the massive aircraft body! Even the super tug looks like a miniature... What a fat ass, huh? My camera kind of messed this up and accidentally still made a great photo of EK60/UAE60 lined up on runway 33 in front of the tower after waiting a few minutes. It had to give way to two arrivals, Aeroflot flight SU710/AFL710 from St. Petersburg Pulkovo (LED/ULLI) and Easyjet flight U21841/EZY76RW from Manchester (MAN/EGCC). Even the sun peeked out under the clouds to take a look at this A380... And there it went again jetting to another nice night Dubai (DXB/OMDB), landing close to midnight local time at 23°C / 73° F. Wish I could join. Well, one day I will. Only to fly on the A380. I just have to.

Hey guys! I made a short, spontaneous stint to my home airport again. This time I went up to the viewing balcony on top of Terminal 1 (the one in Terminal 2 is closed, unfortunately). Not a grateful spot on a late December afternoon, but I have a pretty good camera and there's still Photoshop to make the best out of it, right? One of the first operations to observe was the pushback of Swiss flight 1057 (LX1057/SWR109A), an Airbus A320 registered HB-IJJ, onto the blue line of taxiway Z1. This was something I noticed pretty soon: except for Heavys and Supers, jets were pushed onto Z1 blue while arriving jets took Z1 red to get to their gates. This is, of course, so departing traffic still in ground handling doesn't block the taxiway. There's enough wingtip clearance for a medium jet to pass left of another. As you already know: Hamburg is an Airbus city. Unsurprisingly, you see many Airbusses, and most of them are the A320 kind. Here you have three in one picture (even four, if you count the tail of Lufthansa A320 with the registration D-AIZF in, which left us a little later as flight LH2067/DLH6RF to Munich). The Spaniard and the Austrian had to wait for the French guy to arrive. After AF1710/AFR1710, an A320 from Paris Charles des Gaulles (CDG/LFPG), had landed, the next to go was the Vueling A320neo (registration EC-NCS) departing to Barcelona (BCN/LEBL) on its second flight of the day under flight number VY1825/VLG2CC, which was followed in the evening by a turn to Palma de Mallorca (PMI/LEPA). Two minutes behind the Vueling, the Austrian A320 (OE-LXC) departed to Vienna-Schwechat for its third flight out of Hamburg this week, with flight number OS174/AUA4DP. My position on the balcony gave a great look onto what happened on the apron. One of the first tasks for the ramp agent when the French A320 registered F-GKXT had stopped at its designated position: plug in the head set and establish communication with the pilots. I don't think they talked about this, but the aircraft returned to the Air France fleet in 2019 after the airline shut down the doors of its subsidy Joon after not even three years of existence. Another interesting observation for me to make were the cones being put up at the end of the tail, in front and behind of the engines as well as in front of the nose. Still from the Frenchie who has two incidents on record: a near-collision with a drone on approach into CDG in 2016 and a flight cancellation due to fumes from de-icing on the stand in Budapest prior to boarding gave all four flight attendants a headache. I wonder what was in those containers... probably just more luggage, since this Paris flight was a real globetrotter, carrying passengers from six other flights according to the code-sharing: CZ7168 (China Southern Airlines), DL8472 (Delta Air Lines), KQ3850 (Kenya Airways), MK9182 (Air Mauritius), UU8710 (Air Austral from Réunion) and VS6412 (Virgin Atlantic).

The only times I noticed this happening is when I switch runways during the game, like initially using JFK's 13s and, due to (random) weather, having to switch to the opposite direction. In that case, the camera looks the way the planes were formerly supposed to come from (the 13s) although they're actually coming from a different direction.

Republic took over the Compass flights out of JFK, for example (like this: https://www.flightradar24.com/RPA5615/29b49acf).