Twin Otter : Pavas, Costa Rica to Volcan, Panamá

Today we will take the same Twin Otter from our hangar with the Cayman Air livery. I have not been able to find a Twin Otter in Nature Air livery. I was running out of places to do virtual flights in Panama so I decided to enjoy more latinamerican scenery.

In today’s flight we will fly from the “Tobías Bolaños” (ICAO: MRPV) airport in the town of Pavas near San José, Costa Rica and fly all the way to Volcán, Chiriquí in Panama (FSX: MP21, FS9: PX02). Still using the same FSX Mesh South America by having installed the parts that cover Panama, part of Costa Rica and part of Colombia.

Our flight will take a bit over an hour and according to FSX it would require 57 gallons of fuel. I loaded 200 gallons to account for extra usage and inconveniences. The trip length is around 115 nautical miles.

Departure – MRPV
The default scenery is interesting but unfortunately this airport is poorly depicted in FSX. I found some FSX MRPV update by Luis Jimenez but it shows all in black so I had to uninstall it. In real life this airport has taxiways, hangars and lots of parking spots. Shame on the ACES Team.

Given we have to use the poor default airport, there was no other alternative than to start at the runway (09). Tobias Bolaños airport is at 3284 ft elevation and has a runway 5248’ long in FSX.

Engines are on, prepare for take off please. The pilot tunes NAV1 to the nearby MROC airport’s VOR/DME (TIO: 115.7) and the OBS to radial 139 which will be to our right (we won’t fly on this radial) until we converge on FINCA intersection. As an aid we will tune NAV2 to the Enrique Malek’s Intl. in David, Panama (DAV: 114.3 VOR/DME). We will also tune the ADF to a nearby NDB (PAR: 395.00 KHz) which will be on our right the whole way.

Flaps set, throttles set smoothly to full power. Watch the EICAS to monitor the engines spooling up. OK, release the brakes and off we go. As we gained speed we came to rotation speed and continued our climb at runway heading. Little by little retract flaps as per speed restrictions and start turning right heading 139º towards FINCA intersection some 25.4 nm away. Remember we are not tracking the VOR1 radial but we must keep it on our right, with this OBS setting on VOR1 we should see centering the needle when we reach FINCA.

So departure time was 16:15 local time (UTC-6) and if all goes well we should land our charter flight before it gets dark because Volcán airport doesn’t have lights! By the way, the whole ascent was flown manually.

Cruise
At 16:28 local time we reached our cruise altitude of 15,000 feet because we will have the whole mountain range of Central America our our left and during the first 50 nm we will have to be over 13,000 feet or else we will crash on a mountain!. We were now 21 nm outbound TIO VOR/DME. At this point I enabled the autopilot’s altitude hold function which I had set to 15000’ prior to departure.

At 16:31 we saw the VOR1 needle center and we reached the FINCA intersection. Remember the ADF? we left it pointing North (as opposed to moving it to our heading), well now the ADF is showing the PAR needle pointing to 140º. We have used 22.1 gallons of fuel so far, doing good. At this point we are ready for our next leg by turning left heading 125º for the next 78.3 nm. Had some turbulent bouncing at 16:35.

On this FINCA-EGODI leg we set NAV1 to the DAV VOR/DME (see above) and the OBS1 to 322º. We set NAV2 to Bocas del Toro (BDT: 114.90 VOR/DME) and OBS2 to 231º. So, what’s the purpose of this? if we plot on the map we see that EGODI intersection (our next waypoint) is at the intersection of BDT R-231 (44.4nm) and DAV R-322 (36.2nm). So, we should now we are reaching it if we keep our course (take into account the winds) and see both VOR needles centering at that very moment. We can then also monitor progress by watching the DME for both NAV1 and NAV2 on the Bendix. Remember however, we are not tracking neither DAV nor BDT! we are using their radials to locate our EGODI intersection.

Sometime along this leg, at 16:47 local time (still in Costa Rica) we lost PAR on the ADF at 54.6nm from BDT. At this point I tuned the ADF radio to David’s NDB (DAV: 350.00 KHz) and moved the ADF bug to 125º (our current heading to track). Having done this when we reach EGODI intersection we should see both VOR needles centering and the ADF needle pointing to DAV at 150º.

Some 70nm from our departure airport we can safely (remember, flight simulation purposes!!!) descend to 9,000’. As you see on the screenshot during the whole trip we would have the high “cordillera central” on our left, the same mountain range that comes all the way from Mexico. From here we can see both the Caribbean sea and the Pacific ocean. Even the Panamerican highway can be seen on this mountain! quite a trip by car over the “Death Mountain”.

Arrival
Time to announce the passengers we will be arriving soon. The VOR needles centered and the ADF was pointing as predicted (see above). We reached EGODI intersection at 17:55 local time. If there had been upper airspace ATC we would be handed over from Costa Rican airspace to Panamanian airspace at this point. We should be some 11nm from Volcan, 36.2 from David VOR and 44.4 from Bocas del Toro VOR.

We would turn heading 122º towards Volcan airfield which is at 4,642’ altitude with runways 12/30 and the runway is about 6500’ long. It is also a good idea to update both OBS while keeping the same frequencies. Set OBS1 (DAV VOR) to intersect R-330 at 26.7nm and OBS2 (BDT VOR) to intersect R-217 at 42.1nm. The intersection of these two mark the position of our destination. Although with current weather I had sufficient visibility with some clouds one must watch out because this area usually has afternoon showers or storms and very often low hanging clouds, you don’t want to park your a/c on the hill.

Landing
We continued our descent to around 7000’ originally wanting runway 12 but weather conditions changed and I had to circle to go for runway 30 as you see on the screenshot. The default FSX airport is improperly placed in location and altitude, something I fixed with the FSX South America Mesh and the MP21 add-on scenery I developed. It has the taxiway paths and esplanade where a/c park. The real airfield has no building (it is public but seldom used) but I gave myself the artistic liberty to add a small terminal building suitable to the town architecture and some other objects.

My approach to rwy. 30 was a bit off in that I turned left too soon, the approach speed was good and flaps were set accordingly. In any case with proper engine management I was able to align the Twin Otter (I love this a/c) in a smooth manner. Landed softly on rwy. 30, applied brakes and feathered the propellers.

The aircraft stopped prior to the taxiway entrance (to our right). I moved on at 18 kts. and entered the taxiway towards the rustic terminal building where the car was waiting to pick the tourists that chartered this virtual flight. It was 18:04 local time (UTC-5), remember Panama is always one hour ahead of Costa Rica. The (virtual) pilots remained on the plane, right engine left running (no APU here) while the left engine was off to unload baggage and passengers.

Our flight took a little less than an hour, landed on schedule and we used up 77 gallons of fuel. Why is the engine still running? well, most passengers are off, some will go on to Panama and two more will come in. That means we have our next flight right now (in flight simulator time!), we have to depart before it gets dark, we can still see the runway. There will be no other dangers because we will climb and be well off the mountain range. Until then, May the wings be with you and see you on my next flight!

Description	Local time	GMT	UTC offset	Fuel	Runway
MRPV	16:15	22:15	UTC-6	200	09
MP21	18:10	23:10	UTC-5	123	30

On this virtual airline association I have booked a total of 17.5 hours on 22 flights, of which 7 flights were on the Twin Otter totalling 5.1 hours. This doesn’t count the more than 100 that I already had prior to losing my account due to real-life commitments. The flight was flown online on IVAO where I have 176 hours of flight since I joined four years ago. Of course, there had been some offline sim-flying before that but unlike real life, there is no full blown logbook :-).