Introduction

Gustavo Rojas Pinilla International Airport, also known as Sesquicentenario International Airport, is an international airport located on the San Andrés Island, Colombia. The airport serves the cities of San Andrés and San Luis, but also commercially serves the nearby island of Providencia; all being major vacation spots for South and Central American tourists.

The airport is the 6th busiest airport in Colombia in terms of passengers, with 836.234 in 2006. Most of these passengers come from the continental part of the country, due to poor international direct service to the island. Many international tourists have to fly to one of Colombia's or Panama's largest airports (Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Panama City) to be able to reach the islands.

The airport is one of Colombia's fastest growing airports with a 13.4% increase in the number of passengers between 2005 and 2006. Spirit Airlines announced that it intends in flying to the island from Ft. Lauderdale. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla International Airport is currently served by 11 airlines.

(Source-Wikipedia)

Installation, Documentation and Support

This product is $26.53 USD and available from Simmarket. The purchase process is easy and intuitive. You will receive a download link to the 27MB file.

You get:

• The package includes the two islands, made by photo realistic images, with a SRTM mesh. The two airports SKSP (Gustavo Rojas Pinilla Airport) and SKPV (El embrujo) fully detailed:
• Airports fully built with GMAX for ultimate performance
• Photo realistic images for the islands for both night and day.
• High detail textures for the runway, tarmac and taxiways.
• Custom AFCAD for AI traffic
• Marshaller at arrival stand.
• And much more!!
• (Source SimMarket)

Once successfully installed, your San Andres scenery will transform into a much more fun to fly area.
Documentation consists of one 5 page PDF manual (863KB). The added San Andres start menu item only consists of an uninstall link.

The PDF manual is the bare minimum of what I would consider acceptable for a payware product. The manual indicated there are navigational charts included, but I didn’t find a single chart.

Textures

The runway and taxiway textures are wonderful. The use of photo textures for the surrounding areas, although better than some of their other products, still leave a lot to be desired. The building textures are a mix of great and not so great.

Excellent runway textures	Realistic concrete textures
Empty Jetways	Nice Aero Club Logo
On short final	Various types of concrete on the ramp

Now on to the not so pretty. As with other reviews I’ve done on LatinVFR products, the photo textures on surrounding areas bring the quality of the product down.

Very blurry textures	Random house placement
This area is covered in scattered buildings	The fence textures bleed through the hanger wall

The documentation didn’t include recommended settings for the scenery other than to reduce your complexity level if the scenery was too much for your computer. Regardless of what settings I used, I couldn’t get the surrounding scenery to look good at all.

Traffic & Animation

Although the product marketing documentation mentions a “Marshaller” at the stand, I didn’t see one and there were no notes in the manual relating to this feature.

Night Textures

Several other LatinVFR titles have superb night lighting and this one falls somewhere below their other work. I feel it could have been better, but it’s not as bad as other products I’ve tested.

Village night textures	Ramp night textures
Terminal night textures	Parking lot night textures

Providencia (SKPV)

In addition to Gustavo Rojas Pinilla International Airport (SKSP), you also have Providencia airport. I personally like this airport as a nice getaway. The jewel here is the ramp textures at the terminal and the sign describing the airport. Unfortunately there are runway texture issues that take away from the entire experience.

Excellent ramp textures	Serious runway texture issues
More runway problems	On downwind the palm trees have white outlines

Support

The support from LatinVFR is exceptional. It is difficult to give less than a stellar review to a great group of hardworking guys trying to make a name for themselves.

Performance

I didn’t detect any performance issues on my system.

Summary / Closing Remarks

From a customer’s perspective, I can only be honest and hope they can raise the level of quality for any future releases of this title. In my humble opinion, limiting their scenery area to the two included airport’s, and dedicating more time to better quality airport scenery, would be the way to go here.

Spending less time on “photo” scenery textures of the areas surrounding the airports would free up more time to develop a much better product.

Printing

If you wish to print this review or read it offline at your leisure,  right click on the link below, and select "save as"

San Andres and Providencia

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