Tucked into the rolling hills of California's Santa Ynez Valley, roughly 30 miles north of Santa Barbara, Santa Ynez Airport — officially known as Kunkle Field — is one of those quietly charming general aviation destinations that has drawn pilots from across central and southern California for decades. The airport serves both GA and glider pilots, and despite relatively light traffic, it maintains a well-kept, welcoming character that makes it a rewarding fly-in spot. Community developer Nandengo12 has released a substantial scenery enhancement for KIZA that replaces the stock airport with a carefully researched and hand-crafted version built entirely using Microsoft's official SDK, along with a mix of custom and library objects.
The centrepiece of the add-on is a set of custom airport objects: An FBO building, fuel island, west field hangar complex, airport entry sign, and airport identification markings are all present, alongside a Santa Barbara County firehouse positioned near runway 26. The runway itself has been completely remade, as the default MSFS PAPI placement and other navigational features were not accurate to the real airport. Ramp lines and taxiways have similarly been rebuilt from scratch to better reflect actual ground layout, and more than 15 GA parking positions have been added, along with a dedicated helicopter start point.
Nandengo12 has added approximately 100 additional trees to better match local orthoimagery, along with fencing, a weather station, windsocks, ramp clutter, parked vehicles, utility poles, and taxiway lighting.
This is currently a daytime VFR scenery — night lighting has not been added to buildings, though taxiway lights are included. Some of the custom objects are described by the developer as impressionistic rather than perfectly precise, and the Chumash Casino Resort visible on approach to runway 8 remains as default MSFS autogen due to limited source material.
Installation requires placing the extracted folder into your MSFS Community directory. Several dependencies are required: Nandengo12's own California GA library (listed separately on the add-on page) is essential for the hangar objects, and a number of Microsoft Gaya library objects are used, meaning KCGX, EDVK, YLHI, and Tokyo Heliport must be installed to see certain fence and parking sign features. The free UK2000 Common Library is also needed for some ramp objects and can be downloaded directly from the UK2000 website.
If Santa Ynez is part of your California VFR touring routes — or if you simply enjoy discovering well-made regional GA airports — this add-on is well worth adding to your Community folder. As this is a freeware release, downloading is entirely free, but if you find the scenery enhances your flying around the Santa Barbara area, do consider showing your appreciation by leaving a donation for Nandengo12 through the add-on page. You can find the KIZA Santa Ynez Airport scenery enhancement on Flightsim.to at the following link: ➡️ KIZA Santa Ynez Airport, Santa Barbara County, CA, USA — Flightsim.to.