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.

Beech King Air 350 – Jaqué to Albrook,Panama

Briefing
 In today’s flight we will use a Beechcraft King Air 350 (twin propeller) loaded with 160 gallons of fuel for a trip from the town of Jaqué, Darien province in Panama to the Marcos A. Gelabert airport in the capital city of Panama. Actual consumption would be around 86 gallons. We filed an IFR flight plan for a cruise altitude of 6000’ using real-time weather. The map shows two of our reference VOR beacons and Isla del Rey almost midway.

Jaqué, Darien
The town of Jaqué is on the pacific ocean (Gulf of Panama) in the selvatic province of Darien, and is the nearest town to Colombia. Nearby there is also the airfield of Bahía Piñas (fishing resort of the rich & famous) but sadly it is not in FSX. Jaqué airport (MPJE) is at 97 ft and we departed from runway 19. It was raining and ominous clouds were in the area but visibility was good. No radio facilities here either and our ambulance flight will take a policeman shot by FARC guerrilla’s incursioning into Panamanian territory. There is also the JAQUE intersection near the airport.

Climb & Cruise
Went through the checklist and took off at 15:45 from runway 19, full flaps. After takeoff we turned right to go into the opposite direction (heading 316). We set NAV1 to Taboga VOR/DME (TBG 110.00), OBS to 316, NAV2 to La Palma VOR (PML 113.10) and the ADF to Taboga NDB (311.0). We were setup for navigation. Once we reached cruisealtitude we turned off Autofeather, the green indicators went off.

Climbing to 6000’ was easy with little turbulence in spite of the cloud cover. At this altitude we were sandwiched between a layer of clouds underneath and a layer of dark clouds above.

We proceeded towards BOMAK intersection which is just east of Punta Cocos airfield (FS9: MP0H, FSX: PX11) on the southernmost tip of Isla del Rey (King’s Island) some 50+ NM from Jaqué. Past BOMAK we adjusted course to 315 towards TBG VOR. In case of troubles we could land right now at Punta Cocos.

Approach & Landing
The Taboga (TBG) VOR/DME is our approach beacon as there are no navigation beacons on Albrook/Marcos A. Gelabert (MPMG). We turn on autofeather and limit and maintain an approach speed of 202 knots. We should be around 2500’ at Taboga and turn right heading 001 towards the airfield, it was very cloudy as seen in the screenshot but the approach lights were visible as well as the nearby buildings, we should have them on our right. Pity we miss splendid add-on scenery of the Panama Canal by Winfriend Orthmann.

In spite of the scattered clouds we were able to go over the Panama Canal (the Bridge of the America’s and much Panama Canal scenery is missing in both FS9 & FSX) on our final approach. We landed safely on runway 36 at MPMG, retracted flaps, turned off autofeather and taxied to our parking space where the patient would be picked up.

This flight was flown under the Virtual Pilots Association’s flag. Pity, a few days ago there was the Bogota 2010 Campus Party and there was ATC coverage for Panama Center (MPZL) and full coverage on MPTO but I was unable to participate due to other sudden commitments :’(

Incidents & Accidents: Crashed off the Atlantic coast of Panama

How ironic that I have to post this "Incidents and Accidents" but this is how it happened and I am looking for answers.

I am using FSX and for this flight I was using the default Beechcraft King Air 350 with the Ambulance livery. My flight (VIP048) was from MPMG (Marcos A. Gelabert) to MPBO (Bocas del Toro) in Panama. In my virtual mission I was going to (supposedly) pick up an injured tourist. I loaded 215 gallons of fuel, enough for a roundtrip and more. According to the FS estimate it would use up 61 gallons one way. I chose to fly at 10000' ironically because I thought "if I lose engines I can glide longer".

I departed shortly before 6AM and though it was cloudy I climbed to FL100. All was well and I had a blanket of clouds below me at cruise altitude. I engaged the autopilot to go "outside" and take some shots. I heard a couple of warning bells and (didn't know the default a/c had such thing) so after the 2nd I went inside the virtual cockpit. To my surprise the aircraft had lost altitude, was at 6000' and the Master Warning was lit. Oh oh, the ambulance flight will have to declare an emergency (and I was flying online). I was almost midway, flying some 10nm off the atlantic coast.

I scanned the instruments and noticed the LEFT OIL LO & RIGHT OIL LO lamps were lit, Both oil pressure indicators were at zero! The fuel flow indicators where also at zero!!! I was loosing altitude fast and too far off the coast to glide and crash on the dense tropical forest.

The problem with the default a/c is that even under this condition the engine sound was still the same as if engines were running. There was no engine sound of that when the engines are shut down. The propellers were turning because of the air flow. This was VERY WEIRD. The image here was some minutes before things turned sour.

I attempted engine start, checked all my switches but no luck. Even though it was not in my flight plan I deviated to attempt reaching the coast at the same time I tried to fix the problem. Unfortunately the a/c had lost too much air speed and altitude and I (virtually) crashed into the caribbean sea, too far off to "swim" (in real life I can't even swim) so I guess if this virtual pilot survived this crash into the ocean it was then eaten by the sharks. Rest In Peace.

So the question of this post is... What went wrong??? I had failures disabled, Generators were on, Engine start was on, Battery and all else on. I went through the checklist and found nothing wrong. In a desperate attempt I tried CTRL-E instead of the regular checklist but no luck. I thought it was then the mixture but that was also ok. The only thing I can think off is that I ran out of fuel and therefore the engine start failed, I never saw that fuel flow come off the zero again. But that is also very weird because as I said I loaded more than enough for a round trip and I was barely halfway when radar lost contact with VIP048.  I had no reply nor other ACARS thing to review the flight.

Last words of the pilot was "Holy Mary mother of God! I’m going to die alone in the sea!” No trace was found of this virtual air ambulance, the pilot or the medic on board... As a result I could not file my flight on the virtual airline and I will have to do the flight all over again :(