Quick MSFS Scenery Tutorial: How to Assign Airlines to Gates

Before You Start

Make sure, before you follow this tutorial:

• You have a text editor capable of editing XML files
• Your scenery project is properly set up
• You have placed all your taxiway parking spots, and there are no errors or warnings.

Find Your Airport XML File

In your project, there should be a folder called packed sources. In that, you'll want to look for an XML file. It's usually the ICAO name of your airport, with ".xml" appended to it.

Its location depends on how you have your project setup, but you can check your Package Definition XML, and under the asset group with the type "BGL," you should be able to find an asset directory that contains your XML file.

Edit Your XML File

Next, you'll want to open your XML file in your favorite text editor (I'm a huge VSCode fan).

Now, in the XML file, you'll want to find all your Taxiway parking spots; they'll look something like this:

<TaxiwayParking index="84" type="GATE_SMALL" lat="29.65255472956816" lon="-95.27397645799849" heading="285.171631" radius="15.000000" name="GATE" number="32" numberMarking="FALSE"/>

Now, add a new attribute to the parking space titled "airlineCodes" and set the contents of the attribute to a comma-separated list of ICAO airline codes allowed to park at the gate. You can find a list of airline codes on this Wikipedia page.

Once you're done, the updated parking space should look like this:

<TaxiwayParking airlineCodes="DAL" index="84" type="GATE_SMALL" lat="29.65255472956816" lon="-95.27397645799849" heading="285.171631" radius="15.000000" name="GATE" number="32" numberMarking="FALSE"/>

Finishing Up

Once you're done editing all the gates, simply save your XML file, close your text editor and build your project.

ATC should now attempt to match airlines' respective gates in the sim.

That's all! Feel free to join our discord, and message me if you have any questions!