Islas Canarias

By Andrew Herd (7 February 2003)

erosoft have made something of a specialty out of marketing scenery add-ons for Flight Simulator and I am always interested to see their products. A few of their rivals have succumbed to the temptation to promote mediocre products on a tidal wave of hype, which is a self-defeating policy in the relatively small FS add-on market, where users have long memories - but Aerosoft's standards are generally high. This new add-on for FS2002 includes all nine airports on the seven islands that make up the Canaries, new mesh for all the islands and many towns and villages. With the Canaries being such a popular European holiday destination, it has to be worth a look.

The package is only available as a shrinkwrap at a cost of 39.95 euros, which is approximately $33.29. The box contains a single CD, a manual, a set of AENA plates and a registration card. No key code is necessary for installation and with the exception of the plates, all the documentation is available in English, French, German and Spanish - I can't recall seeing many FS products which are quite so multilingual, so congratulations to Aerosoft. Even though the plates are in Spanish, they follow international conventions, so they aren't too difficult to figure out.

The sceneries were developed by Sim-Wings, who coded Aerosoft's Scenery Spain 1 (the Balearic Islands) and Scenery Spain 2 (Spanish Airports), which I haven't seen, though I suspect that if it is as good as Islas Canarias, it is probably worth buying. The airports in Islas Canarias are:

The Canaries must have one of the most interesting sets of airports in Europe and each one has been recreated in enough detail to make it worth revisiting, though some are definitely more interesting than others. La Palma is my favorite - it looks fairly benign in the screen shots above and alongside, but undershooting is not an option, unless you want them to post your remains back to mum in an envelope. The runway might be 2300 meters long, but the undershoot is a wicked place, full of approach light gantries and terminating in a brutal paved upslope to a displaced threshold.

I guess it was a shame I used the Captain Simulations 727 for my first approach, but after the airline finished dealing with all the next of kin, I got the hang of adjusting the trim and made it in fairly consistently after that. According to my copy of Ultimate Airlines - a good program which deserves an upgrade - most flights operating out of there use A319/320/321s, Boeing 757s, ATR 42s and MD-80s, so arriving in the 767 PIC is out, unless you like a real challenge. But if you do manage to get down without bending anything, you can enjoy a virtual coffee in the lounge while you watch the animated windmills generating electricity on the shore in front of you. Then it is time to slog all the way back, or maybe take a 1900D over to one of the other islands. Or stay, and open a bar and buy a fishing boat, though I didn't see any in the seas around the islands, which is an opportunity missed. Perhaps in a later update?

One of the things that makes this a relatively challenging package is that the Canary Islands aren't the first place you would think of if you wanted to build an airport. Granted, a few of the islands do have wide, flat spaces, but almost all the airports are shoehorned in right on the coast and one or two of them have seriously exciting topography to negotiate - imagine executing a missed approach with a full load at La Palma, for instance.

In real life, there must be some challenging wind conditions to negotiate - for example, the ground rises steeply from the runway at El Hierro to 3700 meters and that sort of arrangement is always associated with trouble. Thinking around this, there is a golden opportunity either for someone to create a downdraft/Fohn wind add-on for Flight Simulator, or even for Microsoft to build one into the base product. While they are at it, could we also have orographic cloud hanging on the tops of the islands at places like El Hierro and proper rain squalls that you have to fly around to see where you are going? Sorry, about that, just dreaming again...

Frame rates on my 1.7 Ghz Pentium were very good, chiefly because the developers have used their judgement. While there is a fair bit of animation, like the La Palma wind farm and various other bits and pieces, the scenery doesn't go over the top and I was getting frame rates well over 20 with the default 737 and an average of 15 with the Captain Sim 727, as long as I used the plane without a VC. The PSS Dash 8 gave me only slightly slower frame rates than Microsoft's planes, which only goes to confirm my admiration of it as a package.

There are a few static aircraft, but the scenery works very well with the default AI traffic, not that there is much going on at the smaller aiports. The textures are acceptable to good and although some of them knock your eye out, that is the way the Canaries are - a little unrestrained and very colorful.

I did a couple of night flights and found illuminated buildings, taxiways, and light houses, as you can see in the screen shot alongside. There isn't much by way of seasonal variation in the scenery, but then again, the Canaries look more of less the same all the year round.

What else? The format of the manuals means that the size of the plates is smaller than perhaps one would like. Either my arms are getting too short, or I am beginning to become long-sighted with age, but the fonts were definitely on the edge of my minimums. As is all too commonly the case with FS manuals, parts the contents have been borrowed from elsewhere and they haven't been adequately proof-read, so there are references to Barcelona, but what is more interesting is that the developers have committed themselves to issuing an update to the scenery when the new Los Rodeos airport terminal is complete. Los Rodeos is the northern airport on Tenerife, which you may remember as the scene of one of the world's worst air disasters in 1977, when a KLM and Pan Am 747 collided on the runway in fog. I would recommend reading the airport histories in the manual, because they give a good idea of the sort of aviation activity that takes place at each location and would give anyone wanting to simulate real world flights a good start.

I thought the mesh was pretty good; these are volcanic islands, many of which rear straight out of the sea to great heights and their sides have great fissures and clefts that run straight down into the water. The peak of the Tenerife is at 3718 meters, which makes it the highest mountain in Spain and in real life, if the visibility is good enough, someone standing on the top can see all the Canary islands, although in Flight Simulator, the scenery engine tends to erase anything more than a few tens of miles distant from view. In practice the islands have weather all of their own and I learned a good deal about flying conditions in the Canaries using the 'real weather' feature, although El Hierro's METARs can't be used, because it is missing from the FS2002 database.

Islas Canarias is one of the most interesting scenery packages I have seen in a long while and having seen it, I am surprised that we have had to wait until FS2002 to see such a good commercial add-on for the region. Not only the airports, but the islands themselves are interesting and the developers have struck an excellent balance between detail and frame rates. If you were planning on buying one scenery package to while away the northern winter, this might well be the one to go for - and it makes a great place to try out your new aircraft, if you have bought the PSS Dash 8, the Captain Sim 727, Lago's Twotter, or DreamFleet's 177, this is the place to go.

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