843rd fly-in: Arenal Airport, Costa Rica (MRAN)

[Kumiankka]

link to fly-in index thread

Quote

Next Sunday, March 7th we have another small airport to visit, located next to impressive mountains like our previous destination of Sogndal. But this time ice and snow should be nowhere to be seen, as the mountains in question are the tropical, volcanic mountains near La Fortuna, Costa Rica, served by the small airstrip of Arenal Airport (MRAN), which takes its name from the nearby Arenal Volcano. The volcano and nearby lake are scenic enough to be famous tourist attractions, but likewise impressive in appearance is the freeware scenery linked below, courtesy of Tico Sim and @Luis Jimenez. As this is a tiny single-runway airstrip, don't expect any ILS approaches or in fact any navaids at all - but on the other hand, the terrain here isn't quite as fearsome as last week's fjord landscape, with level ground for some distance around MRAN before the mountains to the south and west. On the other hand, parking space will be even more limited: if we get another large turnout we might have to get creative!

!Buen viaje!

 

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!

 

 

 

[ostkamp]

Scenery hint

If you intend to arrive in some larger bird or do some sightseeing, there is an airport nearby that is covered by some excellent new scenery package:

 

 

[ghun1]

Ticosim is worth investigating for the other packages too, just click ‘find his other files’ from this weeks destination entry.

[pugwash]

On 3/2/2021 at 8:34 PM, ostkamp said:

Scenery hint

If you intend to arrive in some larger bird or do some sightseeing, there is an airport nearby that is covered by some excellent new scenery package:

 

 

Just a word of caution. These are inside an enclosing folder so if you download and pop them straight into custom scenery, they won't show up. 

You need to check inside the download folder for the real airport folder.

Great airports though. Thanks for the tip.

Edited March 4, 2021 by pugwash

[ghun1]

what @pugwash said goes for the other scenery packages by the same author too. He is not the only one that does this. On the one hand it is thoughtful as it reduces the size of the folder that might otherwise be, on the other it means you have to check (the size difference would not be very large if the jpegs etc were in the scenery folder).

[ostkamp]

On 3/4/2021 at 5:49 PM, ghun1 said:

what @pugwash said goes for the other scenery packages by the same author too. He is not the only one that does this. On the one hand it is thoughtful as it reduces the size of the folder that might otherwise be, on the other it means you have to check (the size difference would not be very large if the jpegs etc were in the scenery folder).

The payware tool X-Organizer usually detects such installation errors with nested folders and reports them in the "need attention" section (among applying lots of other validation checks e.g. for missing libraries / objects). Unfortunately it is only available for Windows users, as far as I know.

[pugwash]

36 minutes ago, ostkamp said:

The payware tool X-Organizer usually detects such installation errors with nested folders and reports them in the "need attention" section (among applying lots of other validation checks e.g. for missing libraries / objects). Unfortunately it is only available for Windows users, as far as I know.

Yes sadly. 

As a Mac user I would have loved a tool like that but am now used to sorting out my .ini file manually.

 

[rajo]

All flights for pilot rajo

Date	From	To	Aircraft	Type	Duration	Distance	Earnings	Action
2021/03/07 16:16:47	MRAN	MNBR	HK-8652P	Cirrus SR22 G2	00:54	147	$1,508.75	View
2021/03/07 13:31:45	MRPV	MRAN	HK-8652P	Cirrus SR22 G2	00:21	41	$1,457.47	View

2021/03/06 01:35:53	MRDO	MRPV	HK-8652P	Cirrus SR22 G2	00:33	76	$2,021.32	View
2021/03/05 04:16:41	MPDA	MRDO	HK-8652P	Cirrus SR22 G2	00:26	67	$144.78	View

2021/03/04 04:10:58	MPMG	MPDA	HK-8652P	Cirrus SR22 G2	01:07	175	$2,221.23	View
2021/03/03 02:53:24	MPTO	MPMG	HK-8652P	Cirrus SR22 G2	00:13	12	$135.06	View
2021/03/03 02:12:55	MP0H	MPTO	HK-8652P	Cirrus SR22 G2	00:24	58	$1,917.61	View
2021/03/02 02:57:50	MPLP	MP0H	HK-8652P	Cirrus SR22 G2	00:21	47	($74.89)	View
2021/03/02 02:20:21	SKMZ	MPLP	HK-8652P	Cirrus SR22 G2	01:39	258	$373.93	View

A week ago my plane, the Beachcraft Bonanza 35, had been called the Doctor Killer. I promised to show up today with the so-called Geek Killer, the Cirrus SR 22. Unfortunately, there was no rentable SR22 to be found near MRAN in FSE, only a little further away, in SKMZ.

on saturday evening I reached Tobias Bolanos INTL, MRPV

from where I departed today to MRAN

Unlike usual, this time I was one of the first

The strong crosswind was quite a challenge not only for me, but also for the following aircraft.

But all of them, here @Kumiankka, managed to

the small airfield was now very crowded 

Apparently too big an attraction for a bus driver on the nearby road

@ghun1 tried to land a A320, I think he failed

I took a little detour to the nearest airfield

And then to make a bit of money again with my last flight for today

I skimmed the border from Ortho4xp to standard, the difference is not very big. I had a problem this time with the HGT files that ortho4xp fetches from viewfinderpanomara.org. But this server was down/offline all day yesterday. So I had to get these files from somewhere else, but it worked.

happy landings, cu

 

Edited March 7, 2021 by rajo

[ostkamp]

Hi,

I started my flights this day at Tocumen Intl. Airport (MPTO), Panama in the just updated Saab 340 version 1.6.1.

I joined an outbound radial of VOR TUM at first, then later programmed the GNS 530 which was part of the cockpit.

The first leg was set to airport San Jose Juan Santamaria Intl. (MROC) in Costa Rica, since this bird cannot land at today´s destination.

I attempted to fly a STAR starting at BUFFEO at the Atlantic ocean, then via CUARE and various waypoints to TURRO.

While on my way, I passed 49TE who is visible on my 4 o´clock position below.

When reaching TURRU the plan was to continue approach via TOMA1 and finally on ILS to runway 07. But I failed somehow to program the GNS 530 accordingly. I flew some strange looking patterns on A/P with heading mode until I could get things sorted.

Finally I reached TOMA1 and went on as planned. The last part was done without ILS just with a VFR landing.

Coming in here on this excellent freeware scenery.

Even a working marshaller was included 🙂

Doesn´t that look great? A big thanks goes to @ticosimmer and @Raf_Liveries 👍

I jumped into a new Cessna 172, special mod by @uncertifiedpilot for the flight to our intended destination:

Finally spotted the location of the airport thanks to the callsigns.

The landing was not so easy, since I had some crosswind. Had a hard landing, and to fight to stay on the runway as good as possible. I may have hit the grass somehow as well.

Got parked somehow, the location was cramped full of aircraft.

@rajo aircraft was floating somehow, not sure if the correct model was shown for him. Can also be a vertical offset issue, of course.

Dino5, the rightmost aircraft shows the wrong model, he was flying a TBM850 or so. I had set  this manually to TBM900, however that assignment must have got lost again during the flight.

After the cake break (whipped cream cheese cake with hot chocolate this time 🍰☕- I ♥️ it) I wanted to take the STMA PC-12 out for the last leg, however since I obviously had forgotten to tweak the aircraft model to NOT go into beta mode automatically when the throttle lever is pulled back - I suffered 2 tailstrikes and disappeared to make room for @ghun1 for landing.

I came back with the same Cessna 172 as before. We wanted to go to the Pacific ocean side and fly to Daniel Oduber Quiros Intl. (MRLB), city of Liberia, still in Costa Rica.

After a while I recognized that the engine sound was somewhat louder than usual (I had not picked up the headphones waiting near the windshield) and then recognized I was flying with an open door, oh no! 🤪

I was using VOR LIB for navigation, then at the airport went into traffic pattern to get time for descend and land on runway 07.

Dino5 was just in front of me, landing #1.

All was fine when I was about to touchdown. I noticed I was about to stall and applied more power again. Somehow the engines started some hissing sound and the plane became even more slow than before. I was thinking of beta mode, but as far as I know the Cessna has no such thing. However this one does not even have the blue levers.

I touched down way too hard.

The plane detonated in some spectacular explosion. Kaboom 😞

The pilot cell got smashed into the grass somehow.

Fortunately I could still walk away from this.

Have a safe week and hope to meet you again next week!

@pugwash I seems you had an account on Discord earlier, at least one with your name is listed for the XPFITS server. If you can get it going again, I can help you get the Swift settings sorted with a Screenshot session, in case you need help. Please also check the manual I posted in the fly-in thread of last week.

@rajo Did you fly the Hold my Bear edition of the SR-22 available at http://holdmybeer.at/thepub/?
I tried that one yesterday, but it appeared my framerates went down with it. What are your experiences?

Edited March 7, 2021 by ostkamp

[Quintao]

@ostkamp nice PIREP with the explosion, I haven't seen it like that before!

@rajo nice pictures of the Geek Killer, I have the hold my beer version of the SR22, it's also quite nice.

I wasn't able to participated today as I was out of town until about now, but am enjoying the pictures! 

Edited March 7, 2021 by Quintao

[rajo]

16 hours ago, ostkamp said:

@rajo Did you fly the Hold my Bear edition of the SR-22 available at http://holdmybeer.at/thepub/?
I tried that one yesterday, but it appeared my framerates went down with it. What are your experiences?

No, I'm on macOS , this is Windows only. Its the Carenado V1.2.

Edited March 8, 2021 by rajo

[Kumiankka]

Impressive fireworks @ostkamp - those damage effects have certainly improved since the last I remember, used to be that the sim would just remove either one wing or a part of one if you exceeded the structural G-limits.

 

I started out earlier in the day than most of the crowd, from Costa Rica's capital of San José in the Carenado C208B. The sun was just coming up as I lined up for departure.

 

About 20 minutes later I arrived to a still-empty airport, nobody to see if I messed up the landing. And I very nearly did, heavy crosswind and turbulence kept tossing my plane around until I somehow managed to align with the runway and touch down.

 

It was nowhere near a smooth landing, but given the circumstances I was glad not to swerve off into the grass.

 

While others were still approaching Arenal, I switched to a Piper Archer and headed off to tour the Arenal Volcano and the adjacent lake. The turbulent winds had somehow died down completely, probably due to the sim reloading real weather from someplace else after switching planes. A common problem when visiting these smaller airports without their own reported METAR data.

 

My route took me north to Lake Nicaragua, and then back south to return to Arenal.

 

Due to the relatively calm winds, the landing was much easier for me this time. I found myself a parking space and watched others try their luck, including Angus (parked adjacent) who arrived just after me in a DR400, and Chaser landing his Kodiak in the distance. Unfortunately @rajo's Cirrus got rendered for me as an A320, maybe it's about time for me to look at upgrading the sim and installing the Swift client to help with this issue…

 

By the time I took off again in the default Cessna 172, the heavy crosswind and turbulence had returned.

 

I set course west for the city of Liberia, enduring a very bumpy ride across Lake Arenal.

 

Arriving at Daniel Oduber Quiros Int'l (MRLB) the weather wasn't so crazy and the turbulence was mostly gone, but the headwind was still strong enough to reduce my landing speed down to a crawl. I touched down earlier than I probably should have, and had to spend a long time taxiing along the runway.

 

Finally I set course back to Arenal in a Let L-410. @schmax was just arriving in his PC-12 (lights faintly visible on the left) as I climbed out above the city.

 

The last few pilots were just departing Arenal as I descended past the volcano and prepared for the evening's biggest challenge yet. Although the heavier L-410 dealt with the turbulence much better than the small Cessna, the heavy crosswind was still there, and I hadn't exactly had great successes at landing the Let on these trickier airfields previously (my runway underrun at Simikot, Nepal coming to mind…)

 

Although I used up plenty of runway length again, the landing was a success and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. The Let still seems like an unforgiving aircraft to me, one wrong move with the throttle levers and you sink like a rock as the previous Simikot incident had taught me. Shutting down for the evening, I set off to brew some well-earned coffee.

[Luis Jimenez]

Friends, thank you for sharing these photos, I was glad that you took a tour of my MRAN scenery and others like MRLB and MRPV, I hope you enjoyed it a lot.
Soon I will upload others like MRTR Tambor and MRBT Tortuguero in case you might go for another tour.

Greetings from Costa Rica.

[Vega66]

Greetings all great pilots

In order to make this week's fly-in I had to perform some schedule adjustments, so I missed big part of the group fun. Nevertheless I had plans to visit many of the beautiful airports of this weeks scenic destination, so this time I had to start very early.

 

Since saturday I had been on a mission on Antartida, I managed to catch a ride on an unscheduled flight from South Argentina to chosen start airport MRLB - Daniel Oduber Quirós.

I was soundly asleep when I was suddenly awaken by turbulence as the aircraft turned final. Strong crosswinds made a somewhat rough approach even for a heavy bird like the Dreamliner. So I was anticipating some dificulties on the smaller aircrafts required for this one.

Landed just after sunrise,

and right in time to catch the Sansa regular flight to our Destination (well, sort of, because the regular is made on a caravan, but today the nearest match for me was a Kodiak).

.

   Bumpy ride due to the strong winds, but with very beautiful sceneries all the way.

A bit of struggle with the wind, but managed a fair landing. Here on a slight slope just entering the apron.

Drop some folks, pick another one's, and quickly bactrack to head to the next chosen destination, MROC - San Jose Santamaría. It was a sort of a roller coaster ride, always beaten by the wind, and a hard landing at MROC, by far worse than the first one.

Not as critical as what happened later to @ostkamp, but bad enough to put the aircraft out of service. So for the return to Arenal, picked the Skyway Let-410.

And arrived a few minutes before @rajo. Once again, strong corsswinds presented a heavy challenge, but this time without complaints from the passangers.

 

By this time the Kodiak was brand new, so I still had time for one more destination - La Managua.

Waited for Rajo. Great landing, considering the challenge

And off we go.

 

The skies were getting pretty much alive, but for me it was almost time to leave.

Passed by Ostkamp that was heading to Arenal on the opposite direction (almost not visible in the reduced size photo)

 

And left the party just after landing

I wasn't sure if I was able to get back, but later on I managed a break to return to visit a final destination, So returned once more to Arenal. Very scenic place, even with the default terrain.

At Arenal managed the best landing of the day, with the precious help from@pugwash 

And off we go to the final destination of the day, Limón Intl.

That's all for the week, hope next week to join the fun on a more compatible schedule.

Wish you all a wonderful week.

 

Edited March 8, 2021 by Vega66

[schmax]

Again a new country for me. I decided to start at Juan Santanmaria Airport (MROC) as recommended by @ostkamp. Really nice scenery.

During engine start he also arrived at the aiport.

However, I did not pay attention that MROC is already situated on another scenery tile than our destiantion MRAN for which I gnereted an O4XP tile. Elevation changes are really significant as you can seee:

The flight to MRAN in my PC12 was really quick and situation at MRAN was already quite busy.  Luckily I tried some appraoches the day before so I manged to land (but still it was a hard landing and I would never land there in a PC12 in reality 😮).

 

Also for DIN05 had a wrong model for me in SWIFT and I was not able to fix it (need to check out the manual). And ostkamp landed some minutes after me.
The huge difference in elevation was at MRAN quite useful, as about half of us parked above in the sky, so we could manage to be all at the same time at that small airfield.

 As I had some time left I wanted to fly to the nearby lake and vulcanos.

And then decided to end at Liberja (MRLB) where @Kumiankka was jast taking off, when I approaced the airport's VOR for the pre-defined ILS approach. As I was approaching the airport from the West I also flew a short time overt Pacific ocean.

And then left the plane at Liberja for a nice beer in the town...

 

 

 

[surfintucson]

6 hours ago, Kumiankka said:

 

 

Whoa. A C208 wingspan is what, 50 feet (about 17 meters?)? The runway is narrower than that? The street in front of my house isn't much narrower than that! Nice work everyone who got down there, especially in turbulence and with crosswind.

 

[rajo]

5 hours ago, schmax said:

Again a new country for me. I decided to start at Juan Santanmaria Airport (MROC) as recommended by @ostkamp. Really nice scenery.

During engine start he also arrived at the aiport.

However, I did not pay attention that MROC is already situated on another scenery tile than our destiantion MRAN for which I gnereted an O4XP tile. Elevation changes are really significant as you can seee:

The flight to MRAN in my PC12 was really quick and situation at MRAN was already quite busy.  Luckily I tried some appraoches the day before so I manged to land (but still it was a hard landing and I would never land there in a PC12 in reality 😮).

 

Also for DIN05 had a wrong model for me in SWIFT and I was not able to fix it (need to check out the manual). And ostkamp landed some minutes after me.
The huge difference in elevation was at MRAN quite useful, as about half of us parked above in the sky, so we could manage to be all at the same time at that small airfield.

 As I had some time left I wanted to fly to the nearby lake and vulcanos.

And then decided to end at Liberja (MRLB) where @Kumiankka was jast taking off, when I approaced the airport's VOR for the pre-defined ILS approach. As I was approaching the airport from the West I also flew a short time overt Pacific ocean.

And then left the plane at Liberja for a nice beer in the town...

 

 

 

when did you Ortho4xp? Second half of last week? Viewfinderpanorama.org was offline in this timespan, so the .hgt files could not be loaded, and I encountered same unacceptable height issues. I could get them from http://cloudcapsupport.com/elevation/World-90m/, and put them e.g. to Ortho4XP/Elevation_data/+00-090/N09W084.hgt. Always I use zzz_hd_global_scenery4 with ortho4xp, and then height issues was for me always minimal.

[schmax]

2 hours ago, rajo said:

when did you Ortho4xp? Second half of last week? Viewfinderpanorama.org was offline in this timespan

Yes, viewfinderpanorama was down. But O4XP offers also download from other elevation sources that I selected. Did not check if this source is the issue or the default X-Plane elevation model.