Balearic Islands

By Andrew Herd (30 August 2002)

he Balearics - Ibiza, Menorca and Mallorca - are one of Europe's favorite holiday destinations, a trio of jewels set in the Mediterranean sea. The islands have an interesting past, having belonged to France, Great Britain and Spain at various times, but nowadays the worst thing they have to face is an invasion of tourists every summer. Each island has its own character: Ibiza is the clubbers' capital of Europe; Menorca is the least populated and most laid-back; and Mallorca has long had a reputation for great family vacations. Mallorca paved the way for the explosion of tourism that transformed the islands' economies, starting back in the sixties. The first passenger flights from the islands started in 1921, but it wasn't until 1935 when LAPE; the predecessor of Iberia, started a regular connection. With a brief interruption caused by the war, traffic into Mallorca steadily increased; Son Sant Joan airport taking its millionth passenger in 1962, its second million in '65, 5 million by 1971 and 100 million by 1981, making it one of the busiest airports in the region.

The minimum spec for Aerosoft's package suggests a 500 MHz Pentium, 150 Mb hard disk space, 64 Mb RAM, and Windows 98/Me/2000/XP. Although the scenery ran smoothly on a 1.7 GHz PIV with a target frame rate of 18, I think it would be necessary to turn down scenery density somewhat if you run it on anything less than a 1 GHz Pentium. The developers advise setting maximum visibility to 20 miles, as this not only makes the sim run better, but also duplicates the traditional summer haze we know so well in Europe. There is also a note that the Microsoft AI traffic doesn't align with the runways in the airports unless you apply a patch available on the Aerosoft website - unfortunately, this patch has such a tortuous set of instructions that even I had to sit down and think awhile before I applied it. This is one area where the package could be improved; a self-installing file would be much better than the current patch.

The package was supplied in a colorful box, containing a CD-ROM, a bound set of approach plates, a manual and a registration card. Top left of the package, just above the title is the encouraging sentence "Scenery Spain 1" which gives a clue to the fact that this is only the first in a series of packages dedicated to this wonderful country. The manual is in Spanish, German, French and English and not only covers all the user needs to know about installation, but goes into a fair amount of detail about the history of aviation on the islands. An oversight has left various editorial comments littered throughout the English text, but although these make for amusing reading, the documentation is otherwise of a high standard. The plates are a Spanish language set, but anyone who is reasonably familiar with SIDs and STARs should be able to use them without problems, though some have been slightly clipped at the top during the scanning process.

I had no problems with the installation, which was triggered by the autorun on the CD player and no key code is required. Having had a quick look around the package, I flew the runway 06L approach to Palma de Mallorca, a route which in real life gives excellent views of the town, the harbor and the mountains beyond. Alert readers will have spotted that this also gives you a chance to watch Microsoft's waves breaking across the harbor mole, but this is flagged up as an issue in the manual and to be honest, it doesn't detract from the scenery too much, though it was fascinating watching it.

The first thing to say about "Islas Baleares" is that the scenery is definitely a cut above the average, combining as it does detailed airports with new mesh and an accurate coastline. The mesh is particularly welcome, because until the moment I installed Islas Baleares, I hadn't seen a convincing upgrade. In a default FS2002 installation, the hills shown in the distance in the screen shot opposite are almost entirely lacking and the coastline is very much simplified. While there are quite a few freeware meshes available, all the ones I have seen have serious drawbacks; it seems that because of the difficulty of getting hold of accurate data. The Islas Baleares mesh is excellent.

On the debit side, all this extra detail adds up and unless you have a really fast machine, you will have to put up with some last minute scenery "pop-ups" and late texturing as FS2002 does its best to keep the sim fluid. This is a "feature" of FS, rather than a bug in the package, and only occurs in more complex sceneries; in general I prefer it to having everything on show, but at only 4 frames per second.

The guts of the package are the five airports, Ibiza (LEIB), Menorca (LEMH), the Aeroclub de Mahon, San Luis (LESL), Mallorca (LEPA) and Son Bonet (LESB). Of these, San Luis consists of two buildings, a hedge and a lonely airplane, though it has a runway long enough to land a 767 - having long ago been Menorca's main airport. Son Bonet is a rather larger GA establishment, with a line of hangars and a vast hard standing, together with a clutch of buildings, an abandoned DC-3 and an intriguing hotel. If Son Bonet seems to be rather too well provided for what it is, it too has known better times, serving as Mallorca's major airport until the sixties, when it was replaced by Son San Juan, better known as Palma de Mallorca.

The three remaining fields are much bigger, beginning with Menorca, remembered by many for its distinctive architecture, which has been quite well captured in the package. Next there is Ibiza, with a 9000 foot runway, which should be enough to get almost anything down without frightening the sunbathers; and Palma, which has three runways, ranging from 8000 feet to nearly 11,000.

By Flight Simulator design standards, the airports are okay, by which I don't mean to damn them with faint praise, but I have seen better, particularly from Aerosoft. The general layout of the fields is fine and custom textures are used throughout, but there is nothing to really catch the eye. Whether you see this as a good or a bad thing depends on what you want from a scenery. If you are a hardened big iron simmer and airports are merely places to park the bird while you reprogram the FMC, then Islas Baleares is perfect; on the other hand, GA simmers using the flush of new Gmax planes available these days may want to see more in the fine detail department. Part of the problem is that the package has been designed to work with both FS2000 and FS2002 - in practice this means that the airports have been optimised to work with the earlier version of the sim and they look slightly old fashioned by FS2002 standards. As examples of this, I would hold up the distinctly 2D "billboard" type hedges, the rather restricted range of static planes at the fields and the slightly blotchy textures on some of the buildings.

You can assess all three of these issues in the screen shot on the right, which is a view from the tower at Ibiza. So much care has gone into developing the package, that it is a shame some of the texturing lets it down, because improving the graphics would have had hardly any effect on frame rates. On the other hand, a couple of the airports have "follow-me" cars and the general visual effect is very good, providing you don't get too close to anything.

Unlike the majority of packages of this type, the scenery isn't restricted to the airports themselves. Flying into Palma de Mallorca, you will see lighthouses and harbors and even ships and sailing boats, which all adds to the air of realism, but such detail becomes progressively harder to find the further you get away from the environs of the airports. The fort at Ibiza is there, but carry on around the coast a little way and all you are left with is AutoGen. What it adds up to is realistic reviews on the approaches to the main airports, but little change elsewhere other than the mesh.

This is a shame, because in real life, the Balearics are endlessly interesting from above and the designers have missed a golden opportunity to produce a more rounded package which pleases not only the jet jockeys, but also GA simmers. Maybe, given enough encouragement, the next version might upgrade the VFR aspects of the scenery, because it wouldn't take too much work to add in some of the smaller harbors and lighthouses that stud the islands.

The airports and surrounding scenery are well lit at night, making a night approach to Ibiza something of a treat as you thunder in over all the people who didn't realise why their hotel room was so cheap. Once you have taxiied to the terminal, there are working parking boards at the air gates; though you will need to study the manual to work out which type of aircraft each gate accommodates. None of the gates I tried had animated docking.

Why my comments above? Well, a Balearic Islands scenery like this one, is up against a good deal of freeware competition, which affects any assessment of its worth. Notable freeware Balearics packages include Oliver Pabst's Palma de Mallorca (LEPA) airport [lepa2k22.zip] and Tony Agramont's Balearic Islands [bale2002.zip]; both of which are high quality sceneries in their own right. Tony is a particularly prolific freeware developer; I reviewed his Balearics scenery a while back and liked it, particularly as a VFR sim, though the installation is a complex process, requiring a good working knowledge of Flight Simulator, it comes without any mesh and can be a trifle hard on frame rates.

Bugs? Well, at N3911.82 E00258.80 I found a couple of land tiles mistakenly placed in the sea, but that was about it. All the taxiways joined neatly and the textures blended smoothly. Although the manual warns that using the default AI traffic in Flight Simulator results in planes taxiing through the terminals (hence the patch), on the whole the computer pilots seemed to behave themselves.

Judged as a whole, Islas Baleares is very much worthy of consideration and should be high on your list if you are a jet jock. If you aren't confident about downloading and installing freeware sceneries, then it is just about the only way to make the Balearics look more realistic; even if you are an expert, buying it will save a great deal of trouble. I liked the package and with the exception of the patch, found it easy to install and to use, so if you are thinking of flying to the sun, take a look.

The planes in the screen shots are freeware available on FlightSim.Com:

DC4 in American Overseas Airlines colors - by FS-Design Berlin [dc4aoa2.zip]

Convair 580 in Iberia colors - aircraft by Greg Pepper, repaint by Glen Hall [ib_cv580.zip]

I am still using Ruud Faber's FSScene.02 textures for Europe, because I like 'em so much.

Visit publisher Aerosoft's web site