About This File
About KOLM
KOLM Olympia Regional is a general aviation airport located along the I-5 corridor just south of Washington’s capital. It is a public use facility owned by the Port of Olympia. KOLM offers two paved asphalt runways, an instrument landing system (ILS), the Olympia VOR nav aid, 100LL and Jet-A fuel services, flight schools, oxygen, hangars, tiedowns, and aircraft maintenance facilities. KOLM is also home to the Washington State Patrol’s aviation division and the Olympic Flight Museum. The museum puts on an annual air show offering numerous civil and military static displays, aerobatic and warbird flight demonstrations and usually a US Military jet fighter or two. In 2009, Olympia Regional averaged 131 air operations per day, the vast majority of which were general aviation related.
My Rendition
KOLM was an airport I have wanted to build in WED ever since I got started in scenery building. It is much larger than all the others I have built thus far and I really wanted to save it until I had properly honed my design skills to do it justice. Having attended the annual, “Olympic Airshow,” here on several occasions, I was highly motivated to bring a good quality version of KOLM to XPlane. Well…here we are!
Setting out in the design, I was very pleased to find that the default apt.dat for KOLM was already very well laid out with great lines and a majority of the taxi signs already accurately placed and labeled. Though it still required a significant amount of tweaking, having a good base to build on really made my life a lot easier from the start, helping the rest of the airport design fall into place. As is the case with all of my other airports, I have sought to make KOLM as accurately rendered as possible utilizing available resources.
You’ll quickly notice that this scenery package includes several custom modeled building objects expertly designed by our own Brian Godwin, the designer of the excellent and hugely popular KDFW Dallas Ft. Worth project. While consulting with Brian regarding custom ATC routes, he generously offered to model several of the buildings for me. It really worked out well as I was able to provide my own photos for use in the textures as well as a, “boots on the ground,” perspective. The end result is a scenery package that is exponentially more accurate than I could have created on my own.
Included in the download and packaged with the scenery are two separate ICAO’s, WN70 Northwest Helicopters, and 0WN4 Olympia Heliport. Northwest Helicopters in directly on site and didn’t really require much from me. Olympia Heliport, however, to the immediate southeast of KOLM, is modeled more plausibly, though it’s still a nice place to fly rotorcraft.
KOLM features custom ATC routes and numerous custom buildings. I have also included some, “in hangar,” start locations to add to the immersion level so the user has the choice of making Olympia Regional their home field. Enjoy!
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the following for the big and small contributions made to this scenery:
- Ben Supnik (creator of WED), none of this would be here without you!
- Jacques Brault (creator of several buildings and objects used in this scenery)
- The many contributors to OpensceneryX
- walterblenny (horizontal fuel tanks and anemometer and wind vane objects)
- Mr 3D and chris noe (Real Flag, Flags of the World, Flags of the USA states)
- Aerospace (consultation)
- Pierre Lavaux (consultation/testing)
- Lightman (consultation/testing/encouragement)
Special Thanks
KOLM is really a joint project on so many levels. A very special thanks goes first and foremost to Brian Godwin for all your help bringing this project to life. Thanks for devoting so much of your time and energy to this, from 3D modeling to consultation, advice, and encouragement. I couldn’t have done it without you!
Thanks also to tubakid2347 for the fantastic looking custom segmented circle object.
