Gearing up for Flight Sim Expo and like last year I wanted to connect the place I was going with my flight simming. Enter FlyTampa’s KLAS McCarran International Airport scenery which includes not only a beautiful rendition of the airport but also many of the landmarks of Las Vegas. Let’s have a look at it and do a bit of a review at the same time.

Time for a Vegas heli tour!

What’s the best way to zoom around the Vegas strip? In a helicopter of course! I recently bought CowanSim’s H125 and a review of it is forthcoming. While I get some time in the helicopter to review it, I thought it’d be great to have a look around the strip in this helicopter. It was a great experience!

We start from the helipads on the west side of the airport. There’s a sightseeing tour company that flies H125s out of this spot so that seemed thematically on point.

Taking off I did a quick tour of the airport and then headed out to the strip. FlyTampa have modeled most of Las Vegas’ major landmarks in beautiful detail. Recent updates to the scenery have even added the new Sphere complete with animations that include a bright yellow happy face and an eyeball – not creepy in the slightest!

Other landmarks ranging from the Mandalay Bay to the Luxor are all there. Even the Tropicana, the FSExpo former host, and The Rio, the new host, are fully detailed. The Luxor even shoots out a beam of light out the top at nighttime making for a pretty spectacular visual. These are the kinds of details you’ll even see when you’re flying in on an airliner flight nevermind from my sightseeing helicopter sortie.

There’s a lot of custom animations too. The Mandalay Bay fountain is fully animated with convincing spray, the Vegas Skytrain monorail is animated and appears functional, and some of the hotels with giant displays play actual video ads. It’s a bit over the top and exactly what you expect from Las Vegas scenery!

Flying over the airport I can say too that the airport details are great. The runways and taxiways have great custom texturing, everything appears marked, and the various terminals are also very nicely done. For all of the detailing there are a few areas that don’t have quite as much and the cargo area at KLAS. There’s detail but it doesn’t seem to have as much going on as elsewhere. There’s also not much of the interior modeled – which I frankly don’t really care that much about.

Some fun extra details include a Janet Air 737 parked on the ramp in the appropriate spot. Nice!

After taking in all of these details and flying around for a while I brought the helicopter back in. But not before I took a second circuit of the whole place but this time advancing the clock a bit and seeing what the place looked all lit up. Truly impressive in the dark and one of the best examples of MSFS lighting that I’ve seen!

So, a fun flight, a little reconnoitre, and a scenery review wrapped up into one! This scenery does take up a lot of space and it is a bit heavy on frames but not as heavy as you’d expect given that they have videos playing on the sides of buildings.

If you want it

You can buy FlyTampa’s KLAS Las Vegas scenery direct from their website or from OrbxDirect for about $20.00 USD regular price. A pretty good deal considering everything that is packed into this product.