Jaqué to Guararé (Panama) in a Beech King Air 350

Ladies & Gents, today we are going to do another IFR practice in FSX, this time during the late hours of the afternoon. I will use my beloved Beechcraft King Air 350 with my call sign and add-on scenery courtesy of Lord of Wings Flight Simulation.
We will depart from Jaqué airfield in the province of Darién, Panama with a runway 800 meters long. Departure time will be 17:22 with 538 gallons of fuel for an estimated travel time of 00:40 minutes.
Cruise altitude will be 12,000 ft and our destination will be Guararé airfield in Los Santos. We will be flying over the water all the time. We will make use of the on-board instruments for our IFR navigation. The flight plan is shown on the figure on your upper left.

Departure from Jaqué

Jaqué (ICAO: MPJE, IATA: JQE) is a small airfield in Darien, flown only by private aircraft and one commercial airline (Air Panama). I will be using add-on scenery by Lord of Wings Flight Simulation which is under development, unlike the horrendous FSX default this airport is updated and contains the VFR references not found on the stock FSX.
   As a preparation I tuned NAV1 to Taboga (TBG 110.00) VOR-DME and set OBS to 309º. Also tuned NAV2 to La Palma VOR (PML 113.10) and the ADF to Taboga NDB (TBG 311.00). Prepared (but not armed) the autopilot to the cruise altitude of 12,000 feet.

  Departure was from runway 13 with little winds and scattered clouds around 8,000 ft. Upon take-off I turned right to intercept R-309 inbound TBG. Jaqué is 113 nm from Taboga. On this radial we are going to fly on airway V20 towards BOMAK intersection which is about 51 nm from Taboga, do the math, our first leg is 62 nm.

On our initial climb and less than 5 nm northwest of Jaque airfield is the Bahía Piñas (BFQ) airfield and the nearby Tropic Star Lodge. These are not in the stock FSX and the coastline doesn’t even resemble it, but the add-on scenery greatly improves this. At this point we make sure our heading bug is set to 258º for our next leg (BOMAK-MP20)

Climb & Cruise

We continue our climb to FL120 and maintaining our course inbound to Taboga towards BOMAK, we maintain the CDI centered and enjoy the nature of Darien on our right and the Gulf of Panama underneath us. Turned off the autofeather when reached cruise altitude.
We watch the DME coupled to NAV1 (TGB), while being centered on the radial we should be at BOMAK when the DME marks 51nm. BOMAK is less than a mile west of Punta Cocos (MP26) airfield on Isla del Rey which you should see with good visibility. A couple of miles prior to BOMAK we turn left heading 258º (remeber we set our heading bug?). At this point we should be flying on R-258 outbound La Palma VOR (PML 113.10) so we now set NAV1 to PML, our OBS to 258 as well and NAV2 to TBG. Because PML is no DME, we set the DME instrument to NAV2 (TBG) we will need that as a reference in case of low visibility.

Since the TBG VOR is tuned on NAV2 we an now set the ADF to the Chitre NDB which should be slightly to our front right. It doesn’t have much power so it won’t be alive until we are near the coast of the Azuero peninsula. I am cruising slightly above 200 KIAS. On Approach with good visibility we should see on the far left (11 o’clock) Iguana Island near Pedasí (airfield) and the Mensabe river, Then Pocri river and then ahead of us Guararé river.

Arrival to Guararé

Remember we have the DME tracking on NAV2 (TBG)? well, on this course the CHE NDB should become alive when the DME marks about 45 nm. It points to Chitre airport (MPCE) our alternate airport, it also has lights.

When the DME marks about 54nm from TBG (roughly some 30 minutes into our virtual flight) I initiated the descent from 12,000 to 3,500 or even 3,000. Turned on the landing lights when passing 10,000 ft., armed the autofeather. Since I was going to land on runway 16 I set the heading bug to the runway heading, turn right slightly for the base leg and when appropriate turn left for finals. We will have the mouth of Guararé river on short final.
Our virtual flight arrived to Guararé without inconveniences in about 40 minutes flight time and ended up with 452 gallons, so my virtual King Air 350 used up 86 gallons of fuel. The plane was on blocks at 17:56 local time enjoying the add-on scenery courtesy of Lord of Wings Flight Simulation which replaces the horrendous (and terribly simplistic) stock FSX airport.
  If you want to see the video summary of this flight you can watch it on You Tube.