KAJO, Corona Municipal Airport, Corona, California

This is part of the North American freeware pack 1 by ORBX. I took a short flight from KAJO to Los Alamitos Army Airfield, which is just east of Long Beach airport. It's an easy VFR flight, following route 91and the Santa Ana River, flying through the gap in Chino Hills State Park and Sierra Peak. Corona Airport is a small municipal airport with a single east/west runway (25 and 7). It is surrounded by forest to the north and west, Lake Mathews to the South-East and some hills just west. The airport scenery has a lot of hangars and static light aircraft.

Flying out after a good breakfast at Corona Airpot Cafe

Some nice animated ground crew near the refuelling station

I am using the freeware with with Aerosoft's Los Angeles X scenery. A good landmark en-route is the Angel Stadium of Anaheim after the Santa Ana river turns SSW. From there I follow the grid road system directly west to Los Alamitos, that is visible just before the ocean at Long Beach. Runway 22L is the main runway. There are some static Black Hawk helicopters parked pretty much where they are visible on the Google Satellite view.

Route through the pass following 91

 

On final approach to Los Alamitos, Long Beach in the background

Quite a nice little airport in an area, worth exploring. Does not hit the frame rate too bad either. Lots of interesting static touches around the airport including static aircraft, mobile homes and the cafe.

Static aircraft and mobile home behind the runway

FSX Steam Edition, DLC Aircraft files location

I installed the Just Flight Bf109e yesterday, but wanted to find the manual as it's not obvious where it is put. Steam just does it's work in the background and no indication of the folders it uses. Especially confusing for me as I have a mix of FSX Gold Edition and FSX Steam Edition folders and alo a lot of addon content on a separate SSD, so more than one Steam folder.

After quite a bit of searching using the painfully slow Windows 7 file finder in Explorer (searched for bf109), it turns out the DLC content for the Messerschmitt is in D:\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX\DLC\379232

What a really obvious place for it ! That folder has 4 subfolders and some DRM files. The folders are Effects, JustFlight (contains the manual), SimObjects and Sound.

So the full manual path for me is (it's on my SSD), "D:\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX\DLC\379232\JustFlight\BattleOfBritain_Me109\Me 109 manual Steam.pdf"

I created a shortcut for it and placed on my Desktop !

Just Flight, Messerschmitt Bf 109 (Me 109), Steam Install

I was looking at the Battle of Britain Me 109 on Just Flight Website and it was on offer, but I decided to go for the one on Steam, which is the same one, but Steam installs it, a slightly increased price of 19.99 Euro. I paid for the convenience and it was my first Steam DLC purchase, so I was interested to see how it went. Well it installed automatically and was a very small download, did not ask me for a disk location. I found it on Free Flight by filter for manufacturer of Just Flight.

Bf 109 parked at Wangerooge

So here it is, in all it's glory, a Bf 109 E4, I chose one of the 17 liveries that come with it and landed at EDWG (Wangerooge), part of German Airfields volume 1, which I strongly recommend. There is a very good review at Mutley's Hangar, German Airfields 1 - Island Hopping from Aerosoft. I use this pack with my favourite Britten-Norman Islander, and there is indeed a static one parked up, just out of shot to the left.

There is a conflict with FTX Global airports here, two runways overlay each other, so uncheck FTX_AA_GLOBAL_AIRPORTS in the Scenery Library. Below shows takeoff from EDWI Wilhelmshaven.

One thing I am not happy with, but maybe it's because I don't understand it, I was pressing PrtSc button to take numerous screenshots, but they did not appear in the usual place "Pictures/Flight Simulator X Files", maybe that's because I am running the Steam version now. I only found the one above and it was in a bizarre place on my disk and nothing in the Cloud?! The normal key in FSX is V for screenshot (they are saved in C:\Users\{User}\Pictures\Flight Simulator X Files

Aerosoft Free Alcatraz scenery

Famous as a prison island, it is now a National Park, located in San Francisco Bay.

Take a look on the Aerosoft Website and you will find a small download:

http://www.aerosoft.com/cgi-local/us/iboshop.cgi?showd480,,D00001

This 5.4MB download shows the small island in good detail. I flew around it in a Bell Ranger helicopter, but not many suitable landing spots. There is also a version for FS2004. This scenery does work well with Steam Edition.

It's quite a nice improvement over the default scenery and a fairly small download.

The island is best approached from Oakland International Airport and is approximately NW of the airport between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Rote 80 road bridge. It is a little closer to fly from Alemeda Naval Air Station KNGZ. Attempting to land on the island, the chopper sinks below land and buildings and does not collision detect. But then what to expect from a free offering?