Thursday, 7 April 2016

Tropical Sim, Horta LPHR to Lajes LPLA field (airbase), Azores, Portugal

I am trying out Tropical Sim's sceneries at a couple of small islands in the mid-Atlantic owned by Portugal as they provide convenient stopping off points for general aviation flights from USA (e.g. FlyTampa Boston), to mainland Europe (Lisbon or Gibraltar by Aerosoft), via Madeira (Aerosoft). This is for my round the world flight. Both sceneries are fairly dated, so I cannot say they are good value for money, but LPHR is not a bad price. They are on separate, but very close islands. The frame rate is very good, with around 40 fps on my system. The sceneries do include the whole islands and not just the airports, also with good mesh. LPLA is both a civil and military airport.

Default Horta

Tropical Sim Horta

Compare default scenery (above) with the Tropical Sim scenery for Horta.

I took a short flight to Lajes field on Terceira Island from Horta on the island of Faial Island.

Leaving Horta

Approach to Lajes Field

Landing at Lajes Field

Military aircraft parked at the airbase
On installation, LPHR does require manual adding to the scenery library on FSX Steam. Overall, I would say this is a useful addon(s) for trans-atlantic island hopping, good frame-rate and reasonable value. Not in the same league as Aerosoft Madeira, but good for collectors and island lovers.

Also, there is LPGR Graciosa, the small island in the north of the Azores, covered my TropicalSim scenery. It's a pretty unremarkable airport.
LPGR by TropicalSim

For a good map of the Azores, one on the University of Texas Libraries site here. A cut-out from that map below:



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