Twin Otter: Pavas, C.R. to Bocas del Toro, Panama

Today I will recreate a commercial flight (5C-520) from Nature Air, a Costa Rican airline based at the Tobías Bolaños airport in Pavas just outside San Jose, Costa Rica. This flight departs both in real and simulated time from Pavas (ICAO: MRPV) at 06:30 (12:30 Zulu) and arrives at Bocas del Toro, Panama (ICAO: MPBO) at 08:30 (13:30Z). This 120nm flight takes 1 hour but Costa Rica is 1 hour behind Panama.

In real life this flight is carried out with a Twin Otter (ICAO: DHC6) which I will also use in this simulation. However, I will use the –400 variant. I prepared an IFR flight plan through high ground but still between a wide mountain corridor. In the figure on the left we see the flight plan prepared with Plan-G also showing the elevation profile along the route.We will cruise at FL150 for most of our flight and perform some altitude transitions along the route. Our route will be “MRPV ESRIO g440 CACHI g440 ISEBA/A090 g440 LOKAR/A050 MPBO”. We start with 200 gallons of fuel on board.

Departure
We use Pavas default scenery because there is none for FSX that actually works, a pity it is. At the head of the runway I turned off the Taxi lights and turned on Landing lights. I took off from runway 09 at 06:21 local time (UTC-6) and climbed runway heading to then turn slightly right heading 110º. Prior to departure I had tuned NAV1 to MROC’s navigation aid (TIO: 115.7 VOR/DME) OBS1 to R-110 and NAV2 radio to Limon’s airport (LIO: 116.3 VOR/DME) OBS2 to R-267. ADF to PAR NDB (395 KHz). We should reach ESRIO fix when both needles center showing DME1 15nm and DME2 57nm. One of the big mountains on our left should be the Irazú volcano.

From ESRIO fix we proceed more or less with the same heading towards CACHI intersection which is the boundary of the El Coco control area (Class C airspace) and then possibly handed over to Costa Rica center (MHCC), unfortunately there was no ATC coverage in Costa Rica on IVAO.

Cruise
Passing 10,000 feet I turned off landing lights and kept the same altimeter setting because we were still under the transition altitude (18,000’ in Costa Rica). Around 06:35 I reached our cruise altitude of 15,000 feet (FL150). If this had been a proper Twin Otter simulation I would have had to enable cabin pressurization already :).

Our route for now would be pretty much straight so the virtual passengers were enjoying this view on the right while chewing on the contents of the peanut bags tossed by the copilot. We would be flying between two mountain ranges until the left one disappears and becomes lowlands leading to the beautiful Caribbean Sea.

At 06:42 having passed the high places I initiated a descent to 9,000’ to reach ISEBA at that altitude. When passing 10,000’ I turned the landing lights. Prior to reaching ISEBA plan on tuning the Limon VOR/DME on NAV2 (R-161) and the Bocas del Toro VOR/DME (R-109) on NAV1. At crossing you should have around 38.5 on DME1 and 26.5 on DME2.

I tried to do use the condition lever to lean the mixture during climb and cruise but I quickly found out that this freeware Twin Otter does not really simulate it  :(, it simply shows the lever moving you feel the a/c jolting but no change in RPM as expected, it simply reduces.

Descent
Passed ISEBA and checked that the local time went ahead 1 hour due to the time difference. ISEBA is at the border of Costa Rica and Panama and would have been the handover place between MRCC and MPZL. In real life we would be seeing a lot of jungle and banana plantations of the former Chiriqui Land Company which at some point was taken over by worker’s sindicate which of course could not manage it and has resulted in the whole operation being ill-managed and constantly under problems. Typically syndicate leaders have a big mouth and think they can do the job of educated people better.

From now on we will see several small airfields to our left and right, mostly private airfields from banana plantations. The only exceptions being Sixaola on the Costa Rican side (Sixaola is the river that divides both countries on the Atlantic) and the Changinola airport (sadly, no FSX scenery that makes justice to the area). Once we descended we met a lot of clouds in the area. On the screenshot we see the Changinola river on the distance.

Having passed ISEBA I planned to arrive to our next waypoint LOKAR at 7000’ by this time we had no signal from the PAR NDB. At LOKAR we should have NAV1 on BDT R-109 (17.2nm) and NAV2 on LIO R-138 (43.4nm). Passing LOKAR we turn right heading 131º.

Arrival
Having continued course 131º we should arrive to our Initial Approach Fix (IAF) around 4000’, it is a user waypoint I programmed in Plan-G according to MPBO approach charts. This point is some 6nm inbound BDT towards runway 08. QNH 1001mb, scattered clouds but good visibility. It is time to maintain a suitable approach speed and deploy flaps accordingly. On the screenshot we see our Twin Otter turning left at the IAF towards runway 08. Unfortunately also no ATC coverage at Bocas del Toro on IVAO :(. Had we been instructed towards runway 26 we would fly over BDT at 3000’ heading 104º and at 10nm outbound BDT do a teardrop to go straight for rwy. 26. Bocas del Toro charts here. Now comes the interesting part

Pity my (freeware) Twin Otter doesn’t have a GPWS, I love the 50, 40,20, 10 callouts during final approach. I will try to put on my “Virtual Avionics Engineer” hat and embed the gauge on the 2D panel and hope it works.

At 08:12 local time (UTC-5) I landed my virtual Twin Otter with British Airways livery at the threshold of runway 08 at Bocas del Toro International Airport with 136 gallons on board (used up 64 gallons) and enjoying MPBO airport scenery add-on by Rhett Browning. It hasn’t been updated to contain the airport lights that were recently installed.

I temporarily parked the a/c, turned off the left engine and opened the doors for unloading. Left engine left running because there is neither fuel nor APU here. While our passengers enjoy the relaxed holiday destination of Isla Colon (diving, a few beaches, lots of tourists) and surrounding islands, we take on new passengers for another commercial flight (this time from Air Panama) to the city of David, Chiriquí, Panama.