Introduction

Well... the craftsman at Sim-Wingshave been at it once again, by putting their professional skills intomotion with this new addition to their Canary's Islands project:"Canary Islands Professional - Gran Canaria".

Gran Canaria is the largest airport within the Canary Islands andsees over 13 million passengers a year. It is also the home of theregional airline Binter Canarias and plays host to a Spanish air forcebase. With two Large runways and plenty of parking spaces, the airporthas seen aircraft as large as the Airbus A380. As well as the mainairport, Sim-Wings have also included the smaller GA airport ElBerriel on the south-eastern part of the island, so GA lovers are wellcatered for too!

Airport Buildings

The terminal at Gran Canaria is a mixture of both old and new andis quite different to the "modular" buildings one associates withmodern international airports. Due to its design, I can imagine thatit was quite a challenge to model, however Sim-Wings have managed toproduce a near like for like representation, so hats off to them!

With clever use of texturing, the terminal building looks fresh inthe newer areas, but dated and weathered in the older parts. As wellas the exterior, the interior of the terminal has also been modelled,most notably the departure lounge. This really adds a degree ofauthenticity to the building and was great to see.

Moving away from the main terminal, you also have an FBO plus theBinter Canaries maintenance hangar, both of which look stunning. Tothe south part of the airport you have several hardened aircraftshelters for the military, plus lots of hangars.

Surrounding Scenery

Looking at the second airport included, El Berriel, it was quiteobvious that this part of the scenery wasn't as detailed. Sim-Wingsthemselves describe it as a "Lite scenery" which is a fairdescription. However, in saying that, it still had a good amount ofdetail included, with even the onsite go-kart track beingfeatured. There was also a number of static aircraft models present,plus a custom control building and airport hangar. All in all, ElBerriel makes for a very nice GA airport to head into but do keep inmind that the runway is on the short and narrow side, so it can betricky to use.

As well as the two airports, Sim-Wings have also included the wholeisland of Gran Canaria using colour-corrected photographic imagerycoupled with a 5m mesh. For VFR flyers, it is a dream come true, asthe views on offer can be breath-taking!

Apron, Taxiways And Runways

The taxiway signage both on the ground and on placards wereaccurately placed, and I particularly liked how the weathering on someof them enhanced the realism. The apron area was busy with vehicles,both on the jet-bridge stands and the northern apron area. Withinthis, you also had textures depicting asphalt and concrete and againgood use of weathering was used.

Taxiways were also well done, being weathered like the apron area(good use of rubber marks), but the effects of cracks seemed to be abit repetitive in my opinion.

In regard to the runway textures, these were very good and featureda darker greyish like texturing to show a worn asphalt look. I waspleasantly surprised to see how much detail Sim-Wings had put into therunways, especially as both had accurate rubber marks included.

Both runways had dual PAPI light configurations which was good tosee, as many payware sceneries I have used to not include thisfeature.

SODE

Unfortunately, Sim-Wings have not included SODE as standard withthis product which is something I am rather disappointed with. Mostscenery developers include this feature as standard, so at the veryleast I would have liked to have seen it as an additional option. Insaying that, if you go and visit the Sim-Wings web site you can infact download a file which will enable SODE, but unfortunately it doesnot have an installer. Because of this, I found it very complicated touse and, in the end, gave up and used the default animated jetwayswhich worked well.

Performance

Usually with a scenery as complex and as detailed as this, I wouldexpect to see a slight decrease in performance on my system, butsurprisingly I did not. Framerates remained steady at all times andnever once dropped below my capped 24FPS (even with varied weatherconditions). At the time of testing, my computer only had 8GB of RAMso I can only attribute this performance to the wonderful optimizationdone by the team at Sim-Wings.

Conclusion

This is a scenery which includes a wonderful amount of detail. Notonly do you get two airports with accurately placed buildings, but youalso have the enjoyment of flying over the whole island of GranCanaria. The textures used for the airport buildings, plus those ofthe island are both of very good quality and really help create thatsense of realism flight simmers crave for. In fact, the only downsideI can really think of is the fact that SODE was not included. However,as much as I would like to have seen SODE featured, it did not detractfrom my overall enjoyment. It's for this reason that Gran Canariastands as one of my favourite airports within this region and one thatI can whole heartedly recommend.

Technical Requirements:

• Lockheed Martin Prepar3D V4.x
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 (64 bit)
• CPU: Quad Core CPU with 3.5 GHz
• Memory: 16 GB DDR4 RAM, 2666 MHz
• Graphics card: 4 GB VRAM, DirectX 11
• Download Size: 4.2 GB

Review System:

• Intel Core I5-9600K CPU@ 3.7 GHz OC to 4.6 GHz
• Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB
• RAM: 8GB 2400 MHz
• Windows 10

Alex Dickinson

Purchase Sim-Wings - Canary Islands Professional - Gran Canaria for P3D

Sim-Wings also has scenery for the other Canary Islands

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