British Columbia: Needs work...

...especially, western BC.

I've spent the last couple days looking around MSFS for Whistler ski resort, with no luck. I know Whistler and the way to Whistler pretty well, having skied there several times back in the late '80s and early '90s, traveling by bus from Vancouver each time. There's no airport at Whistler, but there is a seaplane base--airport code CAE5--at Green Lake, which is very close to Whistler Village. I thought it would be fun to fly in there with the amphibious ICON A5.

I started in Seattle, the most recent stop on my West Coast tour in the Daher TBM, flying the Daher to Vancouver--a very pleasant 46-minute trip, where (after a detour to the World Map and my hangar) I switched to the ICON to continue north to Whistler. There was one rub: When I typed "CAE5" in the World Map airport search field, nothing came up. Ditto for Green Lake, BC. (A later search for the longitude/latitude coordinates for Green Lake was also fruitless.) With no GPS to guide me, I took off from Vancouver, turned north, and followed Highway 99, which threads its way along the edge of the scenic Howe Sound before heading into the mountains past the town of Squamish. On the way, I checked Google Maps for the location and--importantly, the shape--of Green Lake, so as to both recognize it in the ICON's GPS display and from the air.

There was no ski area or any other development in sight when I reached the body of water I was pretty sure was Green Lake.

Here's what Green Lake/Whistler look like for real:

Here's what I found:

This lake was seemingly in the right place (or rather, I was seemingly so), but there was no ski area in sight. I landed anyway. The lake on the VFR map sorta resembles Google Earth's Green Lake, but just barely...

Thinking that maybe I had the wrong lake, I took off and flew over/around the mountains, south to another body of water that could've maybe been the one I was looking for, even though it seemed to be in the wrong place. There was no ski area or associated development there either. At this point, I gave up, flew back to Squamish and landed there.

Though I never found Whistler, I enjoyed the scenery.

Perhaps somebody else has found Whistler in MSFS? If so, I'd like to know how to find it. Otherwise, I hope the good folks at Asobo will consider an apparently sorely needed British Columbia update some day.

In any event, I got in some very useful/needed time flying and navigating with no autopilot or GPS. I also learned something about getting the ICON back down to earth (or water). In MSFS, once this plane is airborne, it wants to stay airborne. I found that I even when I cut the throttle to next to nothing, the ICON would still shed altitude and speed too leisurely to suit me. I had to "mush" the ICON--pull the yoke back to raise the angle of attack to near stall point before dropping the nose again--to dump enough altitude and speed to land it.

Check out the add-ons hare.

https://flightsim.to/discover/Whistler