Less than a week after releasing London City, a small commercial airport, iniBuilds has swung to the complete opposite end of the spectrum. In a new development update, the team revealed Chicago O’Hare International Airport (KORD) as one of its most ambitious scenery projects to date, announced a free V2 rebuild of Dubai International (OMDB), and unveiled a multi-jetway system that will allow several passenger boarding bridges to connect to a single aircraft at the same time.
Multiple jetways docking onto one aircraft has been one of those small but persistent immersion gaps in Microsoft Flight Simulator, and the timing of this reveal is surely no coincidence. iniBuilds has promised a full A380 reveal this month, and the team itself makes the connection in the announcement, describing O’Hare as “the perfect home for aircraft such as the upcoming iniBuilds A380 Airliner”.
The pieces of the superjumbo ecosystem are visibly falling into place: the aircraft, the megahubs it operates from, and now the ground infrastructure to board it properly.
Chicago O’Hare
O’Hare needs little introduction. It is one of the busiest airports in the world, a major gateway into North America, and a hub with multiple terminals, vast aprons, and a taxiway system that keeps real-world pilots on their toes. iniBuilds says the airport has been high on its wish list for some time, and that recreating something of this scale presents a unique challenge for the team.
As with several recent projects, the developer sent a team member to Chicago earlier this year for an on-site research trip, capturing hundreds of reference photographs across terminals, check-in halls, departure lounges, and gate areas. Interior spaces are getting particular attention. The team specifically calls out the Hall of Flags in Terminal 3, which film fans will recognise from Home Alone, as one of the iconic locations it wants to recreate authentically.
According to iniBuilds, development has progressed significantly in recent months, with work underway on terminal exteriors, interior modelling, airside roadways, custom ground textures, signage, lighting, and optimisation. O’Hare is enormous, and the developer says a large amount of effort is going into making sure it performs well despite the scale. No release window or pricing has been shared at this stage.
It’s worth noting that O’Hare has been somewhat underserved in the MSFS era. FSDreamTeam’s KORD V2, a port of a scenery that dates back to the Prepar3D days, has been the main payware option, so a ground-up MSFS 2024 rendition of this hub will be welcomed by many US-based simmers.
Dubai V2, free for existing owners
The second reveal is a full V2 of Dubai International Airport, and iniBuilds says it will be free. Dubai has had a bit of a journey in the iniBuilds catalogue: the original release came out in late 2023 for MSFS 2020, followed by the Enhanced 2024 Edition in early 2025. V2 is presented as something more substantial than another refresh. The developer says large portions of the airport are being rebuilt and optimised from the ground up, with reduced node counts, vertex counts, and draw calls, alongside its latest LOD workflows and the optimisation systems available in MSFS 2024.
Beyond performance, areas that previously had limited or no interior modelling are receiving fully realised interior spaces, and the team says the result will be a more detailed airport that is also significantly more efficient than the original.
Multi-jetways!
Anyone who flies the A380, A350, or 777 knows that passengers board these aircraft through several doors. Multiple jetways extending towards a widebody is part of the visual language of big international operations, and it’s something the simulator has never properly represented.
iniBuilds says it has built an exclusive multi-jetway system that allows compatible gates to connect several boarding bridges to one aircraft simultaneously. The details are encouraging. According to the developer, the system is built into the airport package itself, requires no external software, works with any aircraft compatible with default jetways, and is expected to reach Xbox and PlayStation users as well. It will be free to anyone who owns an iniBuilds airport, and the team plans to roll the technology out across past and future airports in the catalogue, with Dubai V2 as the launch platform and O’Hare among the first to feature it.
iniBuilds also addressed the elephant in the ground services room, stating that the system has nothing to do with GSX and that, barring major changes in the upcoming GSX update will seemingly add similar capabilities to the tool, it expects both to coexist without issues. How that plays out in practice is something we’ll only know once both are in users’ hands, but the “no external software” strategy should at least keep things simple for console users, who have never had access to GSX in the first place.
