luisdel flightsim

051 Friday Harbor - Prince Rupert (Canada)

2020-12-04T23:00:00+00:00

KFHR - CYPR

Prince Rupert will be our only stop in Canada’s west coast.

We depart the USA right at dawn, and get the see some nice views of the west coast during the early morning lights:

Once at a cruising altitude of 25’000ft, the winds are very strong (over 50kts) and the turbulence quite hard. So I lower the altitude to 20’000 to see if the air calms down a bit there. Not much luck either.

As we cruise along the Canadian west coastline, we get incredible views of the mountains to the east:

The arrival at Prince Rupert is plagued with dense fog, low ceilings, and low visibility. This was to be expected. It is winter in the northern hemisphere, so the more north we go, the worse the weather will turn.

The landing at Prince Rupert is exciting: with a headwind of 19kts and wind gusts of 29kts, the planes is shaken badly during the last stage of our final approach. Don’t know about you, but in real life, you don’t want your plane to be shaken in the air when you are at only 500ft above ground, coming in slow and losing altitude by the second. The landing was good though, I am getting better at this :)

049 El Paso - Telluride

2020-11-24T23:00:00+00:00

KELP - KTEX

El Paso International Airport - Telluride Regional Airport

Texas is awesome, and I really miss the time I’ve spent there in my past. We are currently in El Paso, which is right at the border with Mexico.

We take off from El Paso on a southwest departure, which puts us right at the Mexican border. From here, we get nice views of the Rio Grande (the main river to divide Mexico from the United States) and Ciudad Juarez, the big Mexican city right at the other side of the border.

From the sky, it all looks the same. Just one city, endless buildings and streets. This is how the planet really is, borders are imaginary things. But once on the ground, there is a big difference from being on one side of the line vs the other, and that is a difference which is hard to reconcile when you look at the big picture. It should all be the same, but it isn’t.

Telluride is a regional airport in the state of Colorado. At 7,111ft, it is the highest commercial airport in the United States. The airfield lies in a plateau surrounded by deep basins cut deep by the erosion of rivers. It’s beautiful:

It must be a difficult approach and landing in real life. But on this flightsim day, the weather is perfect and the landing is simply awesome.

050 Telluride - Friday harbor

2020-11-24T23:00:00+00:00

KTEX - KFHR

We are making our way to our last stop in the continuous USA for the entire world trip. We will come back to the USA when we hit Alaska, but this is it.

We head towards Washington state, an area that is very close to my heart as I’ve been never countless times. In my past, I used to work for Microsoft, which required me to visit the Redmond campus a couple of times per year.

The departure from Telluride is nice, with great views of the irregular terrain:

As we enter Washington state, we get an emblematic view of Mt. Rainier. I say emblematic because if you’ve flown over the state in winter, this view if very typical: fog and clouds all around you, with Mt. Rainier sticking up from the fog in all its glory:

Mt. Rainier is an active volcano with a summit at 4,392m. It’s beautiful in the summer. The highlight of flying on the pacific northwest if you ask me.

For the landing, I chose the Friday harbor airfield. Friday Habor is located in the San Juan Islands archipelago, which is another gorgeous region in Washington state. Beautiful landscapes adorned with water all around them, it’s a great place for whale watching and enjoying some time off from the craziness of the city during a weekend break.

We finally land at Friday Harbor:

048 San Luis Potosi - El Paso (USA)

2020-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

MMSP - KELP

Aeropuerto Internacional Ponciano Arriaga - El Paso International Airport

This is our last stop in Mexico, and we are now heading to El Paso, Texas.

This is the way I remember Texas: dry, vast, flat, huge. I have been to Texas a couple of times in my life, never to El Paso though. And hot as hell (in July at least).

Once you get into the USA, it’s obvious that you are in the USA. Vast infrastructure. Highways, freeways, well-lit airports.

In fact, it is not unusual for airports to be so close to each other, that pilots can get confused and end up landing where they should not. This is the case with El Paso. There is another airfield (Biggs) which is right next to it, has a runway of almost the same length and same heading as runway 22 in El Paso. This is the only country in the world where airports can be so close to each other that they can be confused during approach.

We do find the right airport and the correct runway, and land with a crosswind of 15kts. Not strong enough to be troublesome, but enough to bring some spice into the final approach and landing.

Despite its massive size, we won’t be doing a lot of stops in the USA. Maybe 3 or 4. The USA is so massive and huge, that’s it would take too much time to properly traverse it in detail. We’ll probably plan that for another project, once the world tour is over.

For now, bye bye Latin America, and welcome to the United States of Awesomeness

047 - Minatitlan - San Luis Potosi

2020-11-24T01:00:00+00:00

MMMT - MMSP

Aeropuerto Internacional de Minatitlán - Aeropuerto Internacional de San Luis Potosí

We leave the lowlands of Veracruz and proceed northwest to the center of Mexico. Our destination: San Luis Potosi.

As we leave Minatitlan, we get some nice views of the Gulf of Mexico:

Mexico can be quite mountainous, as it’s home to the Sierra Madre, a 2’350km-long cordillera than crosses the country from northwest to southeast. Our last stop in Mexico will be across this mountain range.

As we get deeper in the Sierra Madre, the landscape gets more arid. Long-gone are the days of tropical rain forest

San Luis Potosi airport lies at 6035ft if altitude. Not crazy high as during our Andean trip, but also not sea level. As we approach San Luis Potosi, we’ll get some nice views of the Sierra Madre Oriental.

Again, we come into the airport from the wrong direction (the runway of landing is pointing in the opposite heading), so we fly over the airfield at 10000ft and proceed to execute a teardrop approach:

Not much to report on the landing itself. The airport has ILS on this runway. Time to land, refuel, and take off to our next destination: El Paso, TX.

046 - Roatan - Minatitlan (Mexico)

2020-11-23T23:00:00+00:00

MHRO - MMMT

Aeropuerto Internacional Juan Manuel Gálvez - Aeropuerto Internacional de Minatitlán

The weather was crap in Roatan. It’s not unusual, it’s a place that sees lots of rainfall during the year. Particularly this time of the year, when the hurricane season is just finishing, but lots of rainfall still comes in from the Caribbean Sea.

However, the cloud ceiling is supposed to be low, so we should break out into the sun soon:

As our flight level for the day is 25000ft, we soon find ourselves over the ceiling and looking into clear, blue skies:

As I take off from Roatan, it dawns on me how small Central America is. It’s tiny. Considering the multiple flights needed to get out of Canada, Brasil, Argentina, Chile… we are done with the Central American Isthmus in 2 stops (Costa Rica and Honduras).

We are now on our way to Mexico.

Minatitlan is in the state of Veracruz. The airport is a small one, and although it offers a VOR navigational aid, it does not have an ILS, so the approach and landing needs to be manual. The weather is excellent in Mexico, so that is not a problem. As we come in from the east, but the runway in operation is runway 07, we first fly over the airport at 2000ft and proceed to do a teardrop approach:

Nothing unusual here, although the terrain does not look as green as it was between Colombia and Honduras. We are heading north, and the tropical jungle gets less dense:

I recognize that, if we keep on going like this, we will reach Canada and Alaska in December, and I am not sure it is a clever idea to fly into Canada-Alaska-Russia during winter months. If this were real life, I would probably avoid doing that. We’ll see what the weather has for us as we move up north. For now, there is still a long way to go until we get there.

045 La Fortuna - Roatan (Honduras)

2020-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

MRAN - MHRO

El Tanque - Aeropuerto Internacional Juan Manuel Gálvez

We leave my home country, Costa Rica, and head up north to Honduras. But not the normal Honduras. We are heading up to a special place, Roatan.

Roatan is a tourist destination in Honduras, and a paradise for those able to dive in the waters of the Caribbean Sea.

As we cross through the north of Costa Rica and into Nicaraguan territory, we are in the middle of the deep, tropical jungle. Long-gone are the days of arid, high-altitude desert, high-elevation airports, and cold temperatures. We are now dealing with sea-level altitudes, hot temperatures and very high humidity, and the freshness and greenness of the tropical rain forest.

As we cross into Honduras from Nicaragua, we can admire the rugged landscape of the country. About 80% of Honduras’s surface is mountainous territory. Roatan is an island off the north coast of the country, so we need to cross the isthmus from one side to the other. As we do this, we have a spectacular view of the Cordillera Nombre de Dios:

Right off the Cordillera there is La Ceiba. If you pay attention the following picture, you will see La Ceiba’s airport too:

We pass over La Ceiba and get feet wet again. Roatan is just 30nm off the coast of Honduras, so it’s not long before we have the island in sight:

And we land in a beautiful, tropical paradise:

Roatan is served by the Juan Manuel Gálvez International airport and is world-famous scuba diving destination. Roatan sits in the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, the second-largest barrier reef in the world. Check out yourselves some of the Wikipedia pages of the wonderful Roatan beaches and some of the marine life available underwater in the barrier reef.

044 Puerto Jimenez - La Fortuna

2020-11-23T01:00:00+00:00

MRPJ - MRAN

Puerto Jimenez, El Tanque

I’ll do a couple of stops to show you around my country.

We leave Puerto Jimenez and head north to La Fortuna. La Fortuna is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country, as it is the town next to the Arenal Volcano, a conical active volcano. Hordes of tourists used to go there for views of the lava and rock-spewing volcano and to enjoy the thermal waters.

El Tanque is a VFR-only airfield, and since this is a mountainous region, I’m curious to see how the approach will work out.

Right after takeoff, we are going to fly right over my mom’s house and make some noise over there. This is the town of La Palma where she lives.

On our way to La Fortuna, we need to cross the Cordillera Central, a mountain range which crosses through Costa Rica right through its middle and is home to a lot of volcanoes. The weather is perfect for VFR flying, so we will enjoy some nice views of the country which saw me come to this world first.

The Sierpe wetlands in the southwest of Costa Rica

San Jose in the background

Here you can see the Poas Volcano

As we approach the Arenal volcano, we can see Lake Arenal in the middle ground and 3 more volcanoes in the background.

Someone once crashed a plane while circling around the Arenal Volcano with tourists. So don’t try this in real life:

And finally we line up with the runway to land at El Tanque.

That’s it folks. A little bit of sightseeing across Costa Rica, but we need to continue our journey north. For the next leg, we’ll head over to Roatan, a diving paradise in the coast of Honduras.

043 Medellin - Puerto Jimenez (Costa Rica)

2020-11-22T23:00:00+00:00

SKRG - MRPJ

José María Córdova International Airport - Puerto Jiménez Airport

With our departure from Medellin, we conclude two things: 1) our Andes hopping trip and 2) we leave South America for good.

It’s been quite a trip around South America. We first entered the sub-continent on September 25th on a flight from Trinidad & Tobago - Boa Vista (Brazil). And we exit South America on November 23rd, almost 2 months later. What a journey this has been. We’ve seen some incredible landscapes along the way: the Amazonas, the Argentinian Pampa, we reached the southernmost point of our journey (Ushuaia), we saw open pit copper mines in Chile, hopped along the Andes (when the weather allowed for it), saw the incredible mountains along the Atacama Desert, Bolivia, and Ecuador, landed in the world’s highest airport (El Alto, Bolivia), and entered back into the tropical rain forest in Colombia.

We head northwest to Costa Rica, to a special place in my heart: Puerto Jimenez. For the first time in a very long time (after we left the Falk islands), we are feet wet as we leave Colombia and enter Panamanian airspace:

That piece of land in the horizon is Panama. But we continue our journey to Puerto Jimenez. On our descent, we cross the border with Costa Rica and get a view of Ciudad Neilly, the mountains in San Vito de Coto Brus, and the palm oil plantations in the Pacific coast of the country:

Puerto Jimenez is where my mother lives, so I know this area quite well, and have taken off this airport multiple times. It’s a VFR-only airport right at the shore in the Golfo Dulce:

This is the worst landing I’ve done so far. Our friends at the Microsoft Flight simulator put some trees right at the start of runway 36, which makes landing impossible. Still, I digged it and touched down the plane with an acceleration of 11G! If this were real life, the plane would have suffered considerable damage (or outright crashed). But in real life we don’t have tall trees in runways, so screw that.

042 Chachoan - Medellin (Colombia)

2020-11-22T09:00:00+00:00

SEAM - SKRG

Ambato Chachoan - Aeropuerto Internacional José María Córdova

We just stopped in Chachoan to refuel and took off right after that. The weather was not great during landing and I did not want to wait for it to get worse. These VFR-only regional airports do not have great weather services, so I was not sure how the weather conditions were going to develop.

We took off in the wrong direction (south instead of north). The purpose of this is to use some of the valley’s length to climb before we head into the mountains. This is a good technique that buys you some time when the climbs are tough. A straight-out departure would have put the mountain ranges right in front of us, and it’s always better to have a good margin of safety when it comes to distance between your plane and the ground:

As you progress north through the Andes, two things become obvious: one: the mountain range becomes narrower, which is always a good thing. If you need to bail out from the mountains due to bad weather, you are just a couple of minutes away from either the coast on the west or the tropical jungle on the east, where the weather might be better for a safe landing.

Two, the terrain gets less dry and arid, and becomes more jungle-like. This becomes obvious when we hit the Colombian tropical rain forest on our way to Medellin:

Medellin is Colombia’s second-largest airport after El Dorado in Bogota. This is the last stop we do in the Andes. After this, we are leaving South America for good and continuing our trip into Central America: