Twin Otter 400 : Playon Chico, San Blas to Marcos A. Gelabert

Second flight of the day to try to sort out communication problems in single-PC mode on IVAO. This flight featured the following:
Playon Chico scenery: Developed by myself
Twin Otter: –400 variant by Premair Aircraft Design with Cayman Airways livery
Simulator: FSX

This would be an IFR (for the fun) flight from the Playon Chico airstrip in San Blas to Panama city’s Marcos A. Gelabert (Albrook) using real-time weather. Playon Chico is a real life airstrip flown to by Air Panama but sadly, it is not a standard FS airport; therefore I developed the add-on based on the little information available and what I could gather from not very detailed satellite imagery. The flight would cover around 81 nautical miles, we would be en route about 40 minutes and hopefully burn some 38 gallons of fuel.

All the strips in San Blas are VFR with visual approaches and no plates. Then only navigation aid in the whole area is the Tupile NDB (356.000 Khz) near Wannukandi. In fact there are many airstrips like this in San Blas, none of them depicted in Microsoft Flight Simulator. For our story, our Twin Otter (-400 variant with glass cockpit) had to remain on site the previous day and for that reason we had a very early departure (05:45 local time). These are short strips that require STOL a/c and we would be departing from runway 36 taking off towards the sea. Landing here (rwy 18) is challenging because there is a mountain at the end of the runway (behind us) so either you land or you land!

Took off at full throttle and turned left heading 262 tracking the Tocumen (TUM) VOR at 117.10 MHz. However, I made a last minute change and flew a while along the beautiful coast of San Blas (poorly depicted in MSFS) and over the Cartí Airport (see screenshot) from our previous flight. Here we see Carti airport just under our left landing gear and over our right wing we see the El Porvenir peninsula. Actually there is a nice island airport there (working on it).

The combination of this a/c with my single-PC setup was rather problematic, communication was very difficult with the virtual ATC (online) so I had to overfly Albrook (missed approach) and head back to go for runway 18 again. Usually I come to land on rwy 36 overflying the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal, but not this time.

On this approach we overfly the Soberanía National Park and even fly over my parent’s home before entering finals for rwy 18. The nice thing about this approach is that you get Ancon Hill in front of you (on the distance) and while descending you also have to make sure you don’t scrape the belly of the a/c on the terrain slope leading towards the threshold.

Yet again this airport is not depicted as the real one, it is an unfinished work of a German freeware developer. In fact this airport is undergoing remodelling, ah, so much is missing! Last but not least, the landing was smooth and only some turbulence and clouds where experienced during the flight. Here in this last screenshot the typical Twin Otter (ICAO: DHC6) as seen in the real airport with one engine running getting ready to load the next bunch of tourists going to the islands. The only problem in this screenshot is that I left the wrong engine running! you don’t want a passenger to inadvertently walk towards the propeller, ouch! that would be a mess!

Anyway, my scenery makes flying to and from these places in San Blas a refreshing experience.