812th fly-in: Casablanca, Morocco (GMMN)

[Kumiankka]

link to fly-in index thread

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This time around we have not one, but two announcements to make, the first of which is the usual new fly-in destination for Sunday, August 2nd. That destination is Mohammed V International Airport (GMMN) in Casablanca, Morocco. This will be our first visit to what is Morocco's busiest airport, following previous fly-ins in Marrakesh in 2006 and Agadir in 2014. Scenery availability has improved a lot since those earlier days, with two payware packages available from Aerosoft as well as Axonos. The freeware option linked below is quite impressive too, including some landmark objects for the city and port in addition to the airport, most prominently the massive Hassan II Mosque overlooking the shoreline.

And as for the second announcement, after another long hiatus it's time to relaunch our traditional fly-in lottery special event! Sign-ups will be open for roughly the next two weeks in a separate thread, and five randomly selected winners will get to choose the fly-in destinations for one of the following five weeks each.

 

Bon voyage - طريق السلامة - inig igerrzen!

 

 

New pilots are always welcome, read the guide below by @bootsie to get started:

How to connect to X-FlightServer

Be considerate towards your fellow pilots, and above all, have fun!

 

[Quintao]

Today's PIREP is a 2 in 1.

1. Flew from Funchal, Madeira to Casablanca on a Bombardier Challenger 300
2. Flew from Casablanca to Lisbon on a Embraer Bandeirante

Here are the pictures for both.

As the days started it seems like we would have people coming to GMMN from all sides

For my first flight I started from Madeira and took off from RWY 05:

To Casablanca it was a 1 hour flight at mach .82, could not go any faster.

Arrived at GMMN via STAR RAVO3A for ILS 35L.

It so happens that I had the wrong NavSource selected during approach and missed the glide slope, so I went for a go around and acquired the ILS on the second try as shown by LittleNavMap.

Landed on GMMN 35L and parked at the gate by Chas.

For the next leg of today's fly-in I went with the Embraer Bandeirante on an Imperial airlines livery. This is actually a route I have flown in real life on a similar turbo prop back in 2003, GMMN - LPPT.

Took off from 35R.

@Kumiankka took off shortly after on a F16 and flew by me.

Headed to Lisbon a lot slower than mach .82 this time.

Entered Portugal's mainland at Faro.

Flew over Lisbon on my approach to LPPT RWY 3.

Soccer (or Futebol for the locals) stadium by the LPPT airport.

Landing was a little crammed as a TAP was on immediate take-off, our distance was just 2 nm.

Landed, taxied and parked at General Aviation.

Looking forward to next week's destination. Keep posting your pictures !

 

 

[Kumiankka]

Similarly to the previous week, I arrived behind most of the pack having departed from Conakry, Guinea for a medium haul across the Sahara.

 

My aircraft of choice was Magknight's payware 787-9, which had a nice Royal Air Maroc livery available for it in the download manager.

 

The journey across the Sahara did not offer much in the way of real world landmarks to see, but there were a few missing scenery tiles along the way. The Sahara seems to have a bunch of these, as we last encountered another one during the Kourou Arkenne fly-in. Maybe there wasn't any terrain data available for this remote area, or maybe these uninhabited locations just went untested when the global scenery was made.

 

After finally arriving in Casablanca, I had the airport practically to myself as most other traffic had already departed. The landing was quite routine, but afterwards I ran into some more of the usual X-Plane weirdness as X-Ivap decided to render @rajo's helicopter as some sort of VTOL aircraft instead!

 

I then switched to the JCS F-16, likewise available in custom Moroccan livery. Here's one of the shots @Quintao posted from another angle.

 

After following Quintao for a while, I lit the afterburner and went exploring the city. After playing too much Ace Combat 7, all those cargo containers sitting around in the harbor gave me a slightly paranoid feeling

 

Luckily in the X-Plane world I didn't have to worry about any surprise UAVs appearing, and I also managed to avoid the more probable hazard in X-Plane - that of departing controlled flight after pulling one G too many. I instead returned to an empty airport to switch aircraft again for one last flight.

 

For that last flight out, I picked the French Potez 25 vintage biplane, following an old Aéropostale route that passed through Casablanca.

 

Before heading north for Rabat, I swung by the city center, now with plenty more time to look at the scenery thanks to the roughly 5 times slower airspeed compared to the F-16.

 

I landed without incident, but the same couldn't be said about my taxiing. Just as I was looking for a parking spot, I braked slightly too hard and flipped the plane over!

 

Remember to sign up for our fly-in lottery if you haven't already, the sign-ups are still open for this week!

[ostkamp]

Hi there,

after the exhausting 6 hours fly-in last time I was very limited to less than 2 hours on this one and thus did only some short hops.

Started off at Ibn Batouta (GMTT) using the newest version of the EvenJet which had just been published the last week:

Note that this model has been ported from X-Plane 8 or so to the next versions over the years, and it does only have a nice 2-D panel - consequently you cannot look through the windows. The sound is not up to my expectations, but it s a very fast plane and of course for free.

Plane was parked in front of the main building.

Airport is located near the coastline.

I went South flying along the Coastline, then later direct VOR SLK (Casablanca) which is South East of the airport and a good location to turn to the ILS approach path for runway 35R.

On final 35R, a bit high but runway was sufficiently long.

Got parked among a lot of other mostly airliners.

After a short break, Din05 arrived in that aircraft with big rotors, seems like a mixture of helicopter and regular plane.

From there we went on to the South to airport Menara GMXX at Marrakech. The following image shows the top part of the console, but it continues down of course. I wasn´t too sure whether the aircraft has a full ILS landing system since there was no traditional APR or NAV button. Probably that´s a combination of LOC and ARM VNAV here.

Getting ready for departure.

On approach to Marrakech.

And finally got parked. Due to lack of time I had to virtually leave before Din05 had landed, but could take the snap afterwards while preparing the cake for start of Formula 1 race in Silverstone, GB - which at the end became a funny one won by a tricycle after on 3 cars the left front tyres had blown up. 😃

See you again next weekend, which will also be short fly-in again.

 

Edited August 3, 2020 by ostkamp