Changing tower view location

I just got this question via email:

Can we please have the ability to move the tower view to the physical location of the tower in the scenery? This worked up to FS9 but was 'broken' in FS9. Pre FS9 if I wanted to make a video recording on my landing I could place the tower view over the phyisical tower, play the video back and watch the landing. In FS9 this is not possible as the tower view seems locked at departure airport.

First, I'd prefer if folks would just comment on the blog posts. All you need to do is sign up. As for the answer, you can do this in FS9. In fact, we didn't change that from FS8. What did change was the default camera behavior. It now 'follows' you as you fly away from the departure airport. It used to stay stuck at the airport, which was not very helpful on transatlantic flights. <g>

 

To change the location manually just open the Map dialog (select Map from the World menu) and click the Tower radio button. You can now change the loaction by typing directly into the edit boxes or by dragging the tower icon with the mouse.

 

Now, the current feature does have some drawbacks. First, it rarely defaults to the actual location of a control tower, if the airport has one. It just picks an arbitrary location 'near' the runway, which may be obstructed by trees, buildings, etc. Second, wouldn't it be cool if the tower view automatically switched to the destination airport so you wouldn't have to change the location by hand? Oh, and what about...

 

Well, I'll leave it to your imagination to think about how else it might be enhanced, if we were to do such a thing.