IMPORTANT, PLEASE READ!!!

We are including an instruction guide, tips and tricks, and an important notes section to answer any questions that you may have! If you encounter any bugs or problems, please check the important notes section before making a comment about it. There's a good chance we are aware of it and planning a fix or working on figuring one out!

IF YOU FIND BUGS OR OTHER ISSUES NOT COVERED BELOW, PLEASE COMMENT BELOW OR MESSAGE ME SO WE HAVE A CHANCE TO FIX THEM! WE CAN'T FIX WHAT WE DON'T KNOW IS BROKEN!

Overview/special thanks

This has been a father/daughter project to recreate the Keesler AFB flightline in high fidelity. This package includes 30+ custom 3D modelled buildings based on photogrammetry data and photographs! This package also adds several missing major bridges to Biloxi! We have been working on this for several months and are finally proud to present this project to everybody! Instead of making this a payware, we wanted to make this free for everyone to give something back to the community, who, have gifted us with many mods we use on a daily basis! Thank you to all of the mod developers, scenery and aircraft developers, and other devs who make this game better/more realistic every day! I want to also give a special thanks to my father, Daniel, who busted his butt putting together 75% of the 3D models and tolerated my frustration with the SDK and Blender as we sorted this stuff out! And my sister, Stephanie, who created the custom Biloxi Bay Bridge model for us to include in the package! Through the good and the bad, and the exceedingly frustrating moments working on this, I will always look back on this fondly working with the two of you! I love you both!

Introduction to Keesler AFB

Keesler AFB, located in Biloxi, MS, is composed of a 1500 acre chunk of land sandwiched between the Biloxi Back Bay and Gulf of Mexico. It employs approximately 5,100 active duty military, 1,625 civil service employees, 103,000+ retirees, and 1,700 contractors. is a major asset to both the local economy, and the well-being of all of the coastal states, but plays an important role for the Air Force as a whole. Keesler AFB is a major training hub for airmen fresh out of BMT. They are educated in various jobs such as Air Traffic, Weather, Cyber-ops, and many other important skills! 

In addition to being a major training hub, the 815th Airlift Squadron is stationed at Keesler AFB and provides the theater commander with the capability to resupply the forces, provide for their airlift requirements and employment operations within the combat zone or forward areas, and when requested, to provide aeromedical/refugee evacuation and augment strategic airlift forces.

Lastly, Keesler AFB is the primary station for the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance squadron, also known as the Hurricane Hunters! They fly C-130s into hurricanes to collect important data to help forecast and track the development of tropical storms and hurricanes that will impact the coast! The USAFR hurricane hunters fly weather missions in an area midway through the Atlantic Ocean to the Hawaiian Islands, and have on occasion flown into typhoons in the Pacific Ocean and gathered data in winter storms.

Details and other information

-HIGHLY detailed aprons on the ENTIRE airfield and adjacent buildings/parking lots

-Real world parking spots and parking spot paint.

-Real world Taxiways

-Runways updated to 22/04, use to be 21/03

-40+ custom 3D modelled buildings that light at night

-Full night lighting (There are almost 1000 accurately placed streetlights, and custom ramp lights so you can see at night! I also took some creative liberties and placed a few lights on the sides of buildings that are tasteful. I couldn't find enough photographs to do actual placements on every single light.)

-Animated ASR-11's 

-Custom TACAN

-Localizer Array added (from KSEA pack, I think it's a default item everybody has!)

-Glideslope shack added

-Perimeter fence around KBIX added

-Added Popp's Ferry bridge, the I-110 bridge, the Bayview bridge  the CSX/L&N railroad bridge, and the Biloxi Bay Bridge/Ocean Springs bridge (all come with night lighting, and bridges are FULLY DRIVEABLE!)

-1000s of scenery items to include fences, cars, parking lots, etc.

-Water Towers added (You need the top gun maverick pack to see these I think)

-The fuel truck will drive out from the fuel area behind Thompson Hall to bring you your fuel! It works from any spot! Just request it from ground!)

-Fuel truck area has been decorated. No custom aprons, but fences, buildings, and vehicles are in place!

-The flight line and perimeter roads are fully driveable with detailed aprons. Please, drive! You won't regret it! Parking spots are listed below (I HIGHLY recommend the airport buggy by WombiiActual on flightsim.to!)

-The back bay and a large portion of the gulf have been flattened to make boating enjoyable! Go check out the bridges from the water! (The way FS2020 did water is insane. In short, instead of making a global sea level at 0 ft, the radar scanned the planet and included seabeds I THINK. The water was then placed X amount above the seabed so in essence, the water is NOT FLAT! By default, there is SLOPE TO THE WATER which results in poor float craft and boat steering hence why I flattened the water. The only downside is that the cat grass islands were also flattened, not that they had much height to them anyway!)

-You can go into the tower cab with your camera and see out the windows. There are no details inside to keep tri/vert counts reasonable but there is a floor and you can do ATC with friends if you want!)

-Added missing hydro lines over the back bay

-Cleaned up trees in many places (namely around the golf course near the marina, there were so many incorrectly placed trees.)

Airfield Information

I will cover a few important things about the airfield for operating out of Keesler and give a brief update on what has been added or changed! If you see something wrong with my information, please let me know and I'll update the guide! My information came from the Keesler AFBI-13-204 which is posted publically on https://www.e-publishing.af.mil/.

-spots 1-14 are for the Flying Jennies

-spots 15-16 are used for transient aircraft

-spots 17-23 are for the Hurricane Hunters

-spots 28-29 are alert spots I THINK. (I'm not 100% sure!)

-spot 31 is for DVs

-spots 33-39 are for transient, fighter-size aircraft

-spots 30 and 41 are for heavy transient aircraft such as C-17. Spot 30 you should face towards the gulf, and spot 41 is a tow in/out only spot for heavy aircraft transients, again, like the C-17. 

-spot X is for distinguished visitors. This is the only covered parking on the field. 

-spots 110-113 are for car spawning

-spot 115 is for boat spawning located in the Keesler marina

-The north hammerhead is the hazardous cargo area

-The VFR traffic patterns are typically flown to the west of the field 

-Rectangular pattern altitude is 1000 Ft MSL / rotary wing at 500 MSL

-Overhead pattern altitude is 1500 Ft MSL

-There are many tactical approach options at Keesler, with a quick search on https://www.e-publishing.af.mil/, you can find the AFBI 13-204 with the information!

Installation Instructions

Its easy to install! The KBIX folder in the zip is the majority of the airfield itself! Just drop that in your community folder or whatever folder you have designated for your airport overhauls! The DRR folder is a libary to add a few small objects that we used in the package, that goes in the community folder, or whatever folder you use for libraries!

Known issues

There are a plethora of things that are not as realistic or do not function as they should, most of them being restrictions with the simulator. Here is a list of things that we are aware of that are not functioning appropriately or inaccurate to the real world! Please, if you have an idea of how to fix any of the problems listed below, do NOT hesitate to comment! I will be checking up on the comments frequently to look for other issues that we might not be aware of!

-Edge lights do not include the overruns (I can see lights on either side of each overrun on the satellite imagery but if I move the runway size to include them, we get edge lights on the side and then the ILS + threshold lights do not line up)

-No KBIX Atis (I spent hours trying to get it to work to no avail, I also tried to make the KGPT an option at KBIX but that also failed.)

-MSFS ATC instructs you to "taxi to general aviation parking" (I was unable to get the ATC to instruct you to "taxi to spot 30". It will, however, instruct you to any of the parking spots on the flight line! C-17s and Heavies should get sent to the right spots due to wingspan!)

-Flat Terrain (I had to apply a flatten polygon on the base to get the roads to be fun to drive on, and also on the water to make it a pleasure to boat on! As a side effect, the approach end of runway 22 doesn't have it's hill, and the cat grass islands have been flattened in the back bay!)

-Wimpy Beacon (For some reason the beacon seems a bit wimpy. I tried swapping it for a civilian one as a temporarily fix and had the same issue, unsure why! Looking into it in the future!)

-Orb lights (There are floating orb lights in places that shouldn't be lit. They are from the base game and cannot, to my knowledge, be removed!)

-Parking spots set to GA_Ramp_large/medium (It had to be done this way for the fuel truck to work. Also to note, the aircraft's configs dictate what services such as pushback, APU, catering, etc spawn. If I set it to Mil_Cargo, that would prevent those services from spawning!)

-CSX Train Bridge ground poly on Biloxi side doesn't line up well (I spent HOURS trying to fix this, I tried disabling buildings, vegetation, terraforming, etc. I simply couldn't get it to be smooth no matter what I tried)

-Missing trees in front of Thompson Hall (The trees in the sim aren't the right kind and look bad)

-Wet looking asphalts/ramps (Will fix for build 2, not familiar with comp maps right now!)

IMPORTANT - I highly advise you to run operations in and out of KBIX with AI aircraft AND AI  ground spawns set off. You don't want airbuses or GA aircraft spawning into an Air Force base, it breaks immersion!

Future plans

We do have future plans to update this mod and try to fix some of the issues listed above! We, however, need a break and are suffering a bit of blender burnout from all of the 3D modelling! So in a few months we might start working on build 2. A few things I want to include in build 2 are;

-Custom marina docks/Building

-Docks between train bridge and Biloxi Bay Bridge

-Roads in the marina

-Pass Road Gate

-Golf club

-Golf Course sidewalk/road aprons

-Track Apron

-Missing bridge in Ocean Springs

-Missing trees in front of Thompson Hall/Other locations

-Looking into making a custom edge light that will blend with the default to fix the overrun issue, and if we can set the light emissive to always face the camera, we might be able to make the lights visible from the sides! (I hate that issue soooo much! Asobo please!)

-GSX support (POSSIBLY)

Conclusion 

IF YOU FIND BUGS OR OTHER ISSUES NOT COVERED ABOVE, PLEASE COMMENT BELOW OR MESSAGE ME SO WE HAVE A CHANCE TO FIX THEM! WE CAN'T FIX WHAT WE DON'T KNOW IS BROKEN!

If you have any questions or comments, please post them below! If you have more information that would make the package more accurate to the real world! Please share it in the comments or private message me and I will look into it! We sincerely hope everybody enjoys the package! we have really been working our butts off to get this launch ready for you everyone to enjoy! Once we get a proper C-130, you can really get immersive with Flying Jennies and Hurricane Hunter simulations! 

Coordinate GPS

30.408978439604784, -88.91970422993673