The Panama canal made trips between the two biggest oceans much shorter and opened up new trading partners for companies in the eastern parts of North and South America and the Orient. VirtualCol has created scenery for Tocumen International, MPTO, in the capital city of Panama. Is this an add-on worth adding to your collection? Let delve into it…
VirtualCol’s scenery includes the airport with custom ground textures, moving vehicles, and the parking area for a complete airport add-on.
Installation and Documentation
Installation is done with an executable file and while you are given a registration number, it is not required in order to install the scenery. It is required to get support and upgrades, however. You have to manually add the scenery to your library once the installer has finished.
The manual is nine pages long. In the FSX manual FS2004 is referred to which makes you think that this is just FS2004 scenery installed into FSX. I did not see any anomaly in the scenery to indicate that this is true so I assume that this is a typo. The manual explains which gates have active jetways and how to activate them which is the same key combinations as in FSX default scenery. They include a list of navaid and radio frequencies to use at the airport and a link to the airports website. Finally, a short FAQ section is included. I’m a little disappointed that there are no charts included and some info on the airports history or operations would have been a nice touch.
The Details
The runways have been redone and they look better than the default. The same goes for the taxiways and, thankfully, they’ve removed the autogen trees that plagued the default scenery’s taxiways. They have covered the airport area with custom ground texture that looks nice.
The textures on the terminals and the gates are good but making them transparent looking as in real life would have been better.
The cargo area is included and done well, too. It includes a dedicated area for DHL. There are hangers and the appropriate signs are put on some of the buildings such as COPA. The maintenance and other facilities are detailed.
They’ve paid extra attention to the passenger side of the airport in that they’ve included detailed parking lots, ramps, and even security gates. The ground vehicles are nicely done with some customer textures, too.
The scenery is compatible with DirectX 10 which is good for those users who find their system operates better with DX10 enabled.
Conclusion
The price of this add-on is 13.21 Euros (~$17.40 Canada/USA) for FSX and FS2004 separately or you can buy them together for 18.30 Euros ($24.09). Now TropicalSim has a version of MPTO too which is more expensive than Virtual Panama’s. I have not seen the TS version but the screenshots look comparible.
Certainly, this is decent scenery at a decent price and well worth it if Panama is on your list of places to fly. If it isn’t, give this scenery a try anyhow. You may find a nice destination to fly to especially if you live in the cold northern regions that are experiencing winter right now.
Developer: VirtualCol
Download size: 15mb
Price: 13.21 Euros for each version or 18.30 for both
