Fernando de Noronha
By Ian Ritchie (7 April 2003)
ften, the best gems
turn up where you least expect them. Indeed, this is true for
Fernando de Noronha. Noronha is located in the South Atlantic Ocean,
215 miles east of Fortaleza, in Brazil. It is the closest South
American point to Africa. The archipelago has a colorful history,
such as serving as a state prison, a political prison and a penal
colony. Now, the island survives on tourism, which is limited by
natural constraints and its unique flora, fauna and geology. Varig
and TRIP airlines service the island daily. It is an airfield that
receives military, commercial and governmental traffic often. It was
an important airbase during the early Atlantic crossing days. It was
also a very important airbase during the Second World War. I can't
even provide a brief history on this island without turning a
flightsim review into a history lesson (however, a very interesting
one).
The minimum system requirements are Windows XP, Me, 98, or 2000, MS
Flight Simulator 2002 Standard or Professional, Pentium III 500 MHz,
128 Mb RAM, CD-ROM drive, 115 Mb free hard disk space and a 16 MB
graphics video card. They recommend a Pentium III 1 GHz or higher,
256 Mb RAM, 64 Mb Graphics video card and 250 Mb free hard disk
space. The test system is a Pentium IIII 2.0 GHz, 256 Mb RAM and a
64mb GeForce2 MX400 video card.
The scenery is purchased through simMarket, and you are given a download link to an 11 mb .exe file, and a serial number to unlock the installation file. The price is 13.95 Euros, which equates to about 13.95 US dollars. It is great value, for what you get.
Fernando de Noronha is accessible by just about any aircraft for FS2002, excluding perhaps ultralights and aircraft A340 and 747 size, unless you are really daring. It is well inside the in-flight range for the Flight1 Piper Meridian, DreamFleet's Archer and just about any other GA aircraft. The runway is the right size for aircraft up to A320 and 737 size.
The scenery comes with the usual updated airport AFCAD files so you
don't have to look at AI aircraft parked away in the trees, and
upgraded AI traffic. There is high detail photoreal landclass
scenery included with the island, and it outfoxes most of the other
commercial photoreal landclass I have seen. It has the standard
autogen scenery, placed in realistic locations - no houses halfway
down hills. The main monuments, ruins and buildings are modeled
superbly in 3D, with details right down to the moss and vines on the
walls of the houses. Rocks have been modeled down at the bases of
some of the cliffs. Also with this scenery, you get high detail
terrain mesh - and this is very high detail terrain mesh, very good
quality indeed. To round out this list of features, there is a
Greenpeace ship off the end of runway 30, with a helipad that it is
possible to land on (somehow...I certainly cannot do it!).
The part of this scenery that really impresses me is Boldrock Peak.
It is, in my opinion, the defining point of this scenery. Once you
have seen it, it is a sight that you will instantly connect with
Fernando de Noronha, and it has been modeled brilliantly. There is
hardly a way to take a screen shot of Noronha without including
Boldrock Peak.
A highlight of the scenery for my daredevil side is the hole in the
rock northeast of the airport, which I carefully flew the Meridian
through the first time I tried it, despite the fact that I am sure I
should have taken my left wing off. The aircraft I would recommend
using for exploring Fernando de noronha would be
ultralights
from Lago and any kind of helicopter, with my personal recommendation
being
Antti Pankkonen's Dauphin helicopter, available here in the
FlightSim.Com file library.
There are not very many things to complain about with the scenery, and most of them are most likely system related to me. The first thing is probably a quirk with the installer that has it taking a while to search for files to start the installation - most likely the problem with having a large hard drive, or something like that. The second problem I had is that I had overloaded my scenery library, and it took me some time to figure that out, so the scenery said it had installed, while it hadn't really, and wasn't showing up in the scenery library. Once I removed scenery I never used, I did not have a problem installing it. My video card seems to have a small problem with bleed through, or to be more correct, shimmering of some scenery from a distance. Something that wouldn't frustrate me, but may get to other simmers that use a similar video card.
There is a problem with probably happens to most users of the
scenery. It is a problem that also plagues GeoRender1 from Lago. I
read on the Lago forum that it is a viewpoint problem - meaning that
if you go to external view, your viewpoint might be from a building
object that Flight Simulator registers as a building crash. Problems
that are mostly meaningless to the average simmer - mainly because I
fly from the cockpit.
Overall, it is a fantastic scenery, well worth the very low price it is offered at, and a great point to get yourself across the Atlantic if you are completing an around the world flight.
This scenery comes from the people that made Wonderful Rio and Brasilia International, two sceneries I have not tried, but if they put this much detail into a small South Atlantic Island, just imagine what those two sceneries must be like, and what their upcoming Amazonia Defenders will be like!
Ian Ritchie
Coolian2@hotmail.com
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