Twin Otter: Azores Island hoping

Today I took my newly acquired Twin Otter 300 with wheels and took it for random flights offline. My setup was to put either stormy weather or real time weather which also turned to be real stormy. For this flight I downloaded all the Andes region of South America mesh (FSX Mesh South America) to get more realistic altitude terrain and the freeware “Discover Portugal” (dpx02.zip) colection of airports, landclass and mesh.

My 1st location was Nazca, Perú. I took off without problems and flew around. While the mountains where tall and satisfying in that sense, the rest was truly disappointing. Microsoft & ACES Team made a horrible work (did they actually spend any serious time doing it? I doubt so) in central and south america. The whole of Perú looked like some desert, totally deprived of most vegetation. Needless to say, after takeoff, flying around and landing on the coast I decided to move my a/c somewhere else.

So, wanting to try my Twin Otter from Aerosoft in my newly installed Netherlands 2000 v4 (for FSX) I started moving it on the map and somehow I found these islands that seemed interesting: The Azores islands.

These are located on the North Atlantic and belong to Portugal. I positioned my plane at 6000’ altitude over the sea flying towards Horta (LPHR). I setup my radios to the FIL NDB (380.0) and the Horta TACAN/VOR (112.70). The weather was just plain horrible and visibility was low. Since this Twin Otter doesn’t have a moving map it was a navigation challenge on purpose. To add some spice and possible horror I enabled random failures on both systems and engines.

My first orientation task, having tuned NAV2 and NAV1 to the TACAN/VOR I then turned the OBS until I got a straight line, that meant that if I flew in that heading (towards the TACAN) I would get to my island. At this stage the ADF was not yet live. The NDB/VOR pair is the initial approach fix (IAF) of LPHR.

In this horrible weather the plane was being rocked and the engines struggled almost as if they were going to quit on me. I flew past Pico island with a nice view of the Pico volcano rising above the sheet of clouds just as it was on Panoramio! Then when I reached the IAF I turned left along the coast towards runway 28 of Horta airport (LPHR).

Wow, this was really challenging! Low visibility, rain, sporadic failures and all. As I flew along the coast of Faial Island towards the runway (not yet in sight) I really had a hard time! I had to keep the yoke in a position of a rate one right turn in order to fly straight! even so, the wind was taking me off to the sea if I lost concentration.

The gusts of wind would force the engines, you could hear them choking and then… my left engine failed completely! This added to the challenge of the (very) strong winds coming from my right that blew me towards the sea. I had to do a lot of compensation work to keep my flight path.

Finally runway in sight, could see the VASI lights at the distance guiding me on the vertical glide path. I had my hands full, aligning to the runway was particularly difficult with the side winds and the engine failure, rudder had to be added to the control attempts. Then on the final approach the wind subsided and I only had to compensate for having only my right engine.

I managed to land the plane with just a little crabbing and then struggle a bit with the wet runway until I taxied to the apron. The cabin looked empty, I think must passengers ran out after all the ups and downs and side gusts that rocked this small airplane. Boy, if it was real life I wouldn’t want to have flown in those conditions! The engine didn’t start again no matter what I did, so I reset the flight.

Keeping the same random failures and the bad weather I started a new aimless flight from LPHR, Took off from runway 28 turned left into the sea and the along the runway. I headed towards the same NDB and VOR, then past it adjusted course towards the Pico airport (LPPI) on the other side of the Pico volcano. Terrible conditions but nice flying and I landed there in spite of the winds. Then I took off from there and decided to try my luck crossing the 15-20nm of north atlantic towards San Jorge Island to the airport of the same name (LPSJ). Pfew! another bad flight, lost my bearings because my nephews were in the bedroom and I was showing them FSX. At some point the plane cork screwed towards the sea but I managed to save the plane (I think passengers would have screamed their hearts out “We are going to die!”) Horrible to say the least. A particular challenge on these conditions was that the horizon on the windshield was not what the real horizon was! so I had to concentrate really hard to keep the a/c level using the attitude indicator. This is a really dangerous condition that disorients real life pilots, in fact that is how one of the Kennedy’s died. Once I had the coast of San Jorge in sight I turned right and headed straight into the runway.

This was so good that I will do it again, next time online and will do all the airports in the Azores with this same Twin Otter DHC6-300 from Aerosoft. This is truly a payware plane you will enjoy flying! I can’t have enough of it to the point I am no longer “flying” for jets.