Cessna 172 – Carti, San Blas to Colon city

Finally I got some time to fly, unfortunately things started going amiss! To begin with my old laptop broke down and got a stuck key. That means I can no longer fly online in multi-PC mode, my laptop hosted the IvAp (communications with ATC) user interface, the IvAe eye, the moving map and the Virtual Pilots reporter. Now I had to operate in single-PC mode which has serious compatibility problems in Windows 7 64 bits. This created a myriad of problems communicating with ATC because the only work around was to exit FSX temporarily to do text/voice comms. Very annoying to say the least! as a result communications didn’t go smootly.
Our Flight
I took a default FSX Cessna Skylane 172SP for a ride (ICAO: C172) from the Cartí airfield in San Blas, Republic of Panama (IATA: CTE). Cartí is not a FS default airport, it is an add-on developed by me based on the real airport. Our destination was the France Field airport (ICAO: MPEJ) “Enrique A. Jimenez” in the city of Colon, Panama.
At Carti you an only depart from runway 02, towards the end of the runway on the left side there is a hut and a parking area. From here people catch the small boats to the islands. If we don’t manage to take off our plane will be ditched on the beach so tie everything up and fasten your seatbelts (or perhaps leave them unattached to exit quickly :-)
We should consume about 25 gallons of fuel on this 20 minute flight covering 54 nautical miles. So, throttle up and after a positive rate of climb I turned left heading 285 towards EGETA intersection some 6 nm away.
Then we turned left again, this time heading 265 direct towards Colon city airport. At some point near Colon I got the Madden/Alajuela Lake on the left as seen on the screenshot. This lake provides water for the Panama canal as well as fresh water for the cities of Colon and Panama. This was a westbound VFR flight so I filed a cruise altitude of 6500 feet. For the most part it was a smooth ride on this small airplane.
And then of course things turned sour! When I was near the city of Colon I ran into some ominous clouds and low visibility, a thunderstorm! The small Cessna was rocking left and right, up and down like a hammock! If it was a real plane I would have been throwing up or perhaps very scared LOL.
Along this route there were no high mountains because I was already relatively near the city. I descended a bit more to get under the clouds, at least the worst ones. There was no rain (yes, flight simulator can do that too!).
For the initial approach overflew the airport at Colon city and then turned right into the sea. Ehem, keeping sufficient altitude as I didn’t want to end up in the water with this storm. I basically flew like a drop pattern, first into the sea and then turning right again towards the coast.
From the screenshot on the right we can see that at this lower altitude it was just hazy but enough visibility to fly the visual approach. By now I had already tuned the France Field FNC VOR at 109.00 MHz.
I set my flaps down as the speed was lowered for the approach and started aligning to the runway. I was going to land on runway 18 from the sea, it is 5528 feet long in FSX. On our final approach we would first overfly the FNC VOR prior to reaching the runway threshold.
Visibility was a bit poor but still doable. The landing was smooth and at this lower altitude there was not much turbulence to fight. I had more problems with the communications due to my PC acting up, I had to go offline because the Teamspeak application stopped responding and I could not communicate with ATC without exiting FSX to type a text message. It was a fun flight in a small aircraft with a bit of challenging conditions.