Hope Vale (also written as Hopevale) is an aboriginal community in Far North Queensland (FNQ), Australia. The place has some history, which you can read here, but it also has personal history for me, because at this place yours truly cut his teeth as a young commercial pilot.
The field has a 1,000+ metre long dirt runway, which on the surface looks innocuous enough, but it actually has considerable bite in it. As a matter of fact, YHPV was the only strip in our AO (which encompassed all of FNQ) for which our chief pilot insisted on personally checking out every new pilot before letting them off on their own.
You see, there’s a considerable hump in the runway, which peaks at only 200 metres along the “preferred” landing direction (10). I say preferred, because the prevalent winds blow from the southeast (tropical trades) pretty much all year round. The aim was to plant your wheels and have your toes on the brakes well short of the 200m mark, otherwise you’d face a long float down the slope towards an uncertain outcome. In my days the upwind end of 10 was also guarded by two large mango trees, which made a late go-around an exciting prospect. (These are now gone, making 28 a viable option even in light tail winds.) Also not helping were a stand of high trees infringing the approach path to 10 (these are still in place), tropical temperatures (with resulting high density altitudes), lots of mechanical turbulence off the surrounding terrain in anything over 15 knots, plus an aircraft (Barons and 310s) usually close to max gross.
The default MSFS airport barely hints at the slope, so I have re-worked the terrain to the best of my memory (with the help of Google Earth). I’ve added a fence that’s there in reality (to keep the grazing cattle off the field) and levelled out the parking positions. I was tempted to add a couple of large trees at the town-end of the runway, but that would have taken my reminiscing too far…
Anyway, enjoy!
Installation:
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Simply copy the included folder into your Community folder. (If you are updating this scenery to a newer version, first delete the existing folder of the same name.)
Dependencies:
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To see the scenery objects I've placed, you will need to have the following object libraries installed:
MSFS 2020 object library with 190+ models ranging from towers hangars to cones by colinj
https://flightsim.to/file/16007/msfs-object-library-with-150-models-ranging-from-towers-hangers-terminals-to-cones
Collection d'avions pour FS2020 by Jean-Pierre Fillion
https://www.jpfil.com/quebec-fs2020/scenes/Collection-avions.zip
Credit: Jean-Pierre Fillion, Quebec
quebec-fs2020.org
jpfil.com
Many thanks to the library object developers for making them available!
Great work! Thanks 😊
2 years ago
sarahymac
Nice, thanks.
2 years ago
fStopper