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Welcome to Kounos airfield, Greece! This small, cozy airfield is situated on the shores of Messianakos Bay (the Gulf of Messinia), near the southern end of the Taíyetos mountains, in the beautiful Peloponnessos. Located 110 nm's southeast of Athens, with Crete 80 nm's distant, the Dodocanese islands within easy reach, and nestled serenely within one of the most beautiful areas of Greeces incomparable beauty; this airfield is ideally suited to explore this beautiful country! With two broad grass airstrips laid out in the classic X-shape, its perfect for GA flying in general, and for flying Classical aircraft in particular. Whether you want to practice crosswind landings in a Cessna, learn the peculiarities of flying the Curtiss Jenny, or want a home base for Ford Trimotor operations capable of reaching any corner of Hellas, this is the place to go! :) The mountains close to the airport and the steep cliffs which loom-over and drop down towards the sea provide a beautiful setting, as well as some amazing navigational challenges ... Nearby Kalamata airport (35 nm to the north) provides an 8,700 ft runway with full instrument procedures, should such needs arise.
As a bonus scenery, we include a representation of the Corinth Canal. It is a very simple representation; we might do something more ambitious at a later time ... But now at least, the water is navigable for sail or float through the full length of the canal, cut deep through the Isthmus of Corinth in the exact location of the real canal. We hope you will enjoy this, as much as we do! :)
As a second bonus scenery, we include the Themistocles Art Studio Limited Float-(plane) Renovation and paint shop, located just north and west of Corinth on the north-coast of the beautiful Gulf of Corinth. Not least among its attractions, its also just a few very short miles north-west of Ag. Nikolaos, and one of the most gorgeous beaches of the entire Balkan region. A sub-venture of the Bacchant Art Studio Limitless in Brazil (known for its custom airbrush paints of the Piper Archer), the "Themis shop" (for short) is the creator of fully-custom airbrush paints for the Lake Turbo Renegade 270 aircraft. Have you downloaded one of the publicly available paints - the Royal Griffith or the Galatea Regal, as yet? If you have, you can now go and pick them up at the very shop where the Galatea Regal was actually created! (more are sure to follow!) or just drop in to say Hi! If you haven't, or would like to do so, they are available at www.SurClaro, file names rgr_lake.zip and galatea.zip ... *hint-hint* ;)
Featuring an adventurous 2,132x96 ft airstrip, right on the beach, perilously close to the sheer cliff walls, and with ample seaplane dock facilities, the shop is also an interesting place in itself, just 50 nms from Athens.
For those of you with hang-gliders, you might appreciate to note as well, that the massive cliff towering over the TASL shop, is an ideal launch-site that will have you soaring over the Gulf of Corinth and virtually in the shadows of Delphi, within a few seconds!
We certainly hope that you will enjoy this scenery. If you have only one tenth as much fun flying around it as we do and have had creating it, you are in for a total blast! :)
Lighting: Both runways have medium intensity edge lights and threshold lights. Rwy 15/33 also has an approach lighting system (ODALS), REIL, and PLASI (4 degrees for rwy 15 due to trees and a road, 3 degrees for rwy 33).
Fuel: AVGAS available; fuel box at the northern end of the airfield.
Navaids: NDB located close to the field; freq 316.0 KHz, ID TB3. Limited range in FS2002 ...
Instrument and night flying: Mountains close to the east of the airport make this a challenge. At night or in marginal weather, we would recommend letting down using the instrument procedures of nearby Kalamata airport (35 nm to the north), and proceeding VFR towards Kounos. The NDB will still be very useful... Standard NDB approaches to rwy 15 (with a procedure turn, inbound course 145 degrees) work just fine, but the MSA in the area is pretty high! NDB approaches to rwy 04 are also possible (inbound course 040 degrees), but a missed approach requires an immediate left turn due to rapidly rising terrain. NDB approaches to rwy 33 are not recommended, and to rwy 22 it would be insane to even try it ... ;). An MDA of 1,200 ft seems appropriate, and after a missed approach, hold at 2,000 ft over the NDB, right turns, inbound heading 145 deg. But the weather in the area is usually excellent anyway ... :)
REQUIREMENTS
The Kounos scenery works equally well in both FS2002 and FS2004.
The AFCAD files only work in FS2002.
The Corinth Canal bonus scenery is provided in two versions, one for FS2002 and one for FS2004.
Neither of the above mentioned scenery requires any other third-party additions to be present.
The Themistocles Art Studio Limited bonus scenery only works in FS2002, it requires Lago's FS Scenery Enhancer and Lago's FS Soundscape, and it requires the Nova Gold textures (novagt1.zip) to be present in the main "FS2002/Texture" folder.
While they are not required, we can very warmly recommend Svante Wendel's mesh (eurmed-1.zip) and Raimondo Taburet's landclass (gree_lc.zip), both for FS2002 and FS2004. They improve the appearance of these beautiful areas tremendously! It is genuinely a night and day difference, in strong favor of these addons.
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
There are many variations to this procedure; if you know what you are doing and would prefer some other setup, go ahead. This is the procedure we recommend however; if you don't know exactly what youre doing, then please follow it to the letter youll save yourself a world of headaches and accumulated frustrations.
- Unzip this archive to a temp folder, with the "Use folder names" option selected.
Installation of the Kounos scenery:
- Copy the "Kounos_Airfield" folder, with it's "/scenery" and "/texture" subfolders, to the "Addon Scenery" folder of FS2002 or FS2004 (or both! :)).
- Add the new scenery folder to the Scenery Library in the standard way.
Installation of the AFCAD file for the Kounos scenery (FS2002 only!)
- In the "Kounos/Afcad (2k2 only)" folder, drag the "TB3_Afcad.txt" file onto the "AFInstaller.exe" icon.
Installation of the Corinth Canal bonus scenery:
- Copy the "Corinth_2k2" (if installing to FS2002) or the "Corinth_2k4" (if installing to FS2004) folder, with its "/scenery" subfolder, to the "Addon Scenery" folder of FS2002 or FS2004. Note that there must not be a "/texture" subfolder present in the "Corinth_2k2" or "Corinth_2k4" folders.
- Add the new scenery folder to the Scenery Library in the standard way
Installation of the Themis bonus scenery:
- Copy the "Themis_.bgl" to the "../Addon Scenery/Kounos_Airfield/scenery" (it needs some textures in the "../Addon Scenery/Kounos_Airfield/texture" folder).
- Copy the "NovaLib1.bgl" to the main "FS2002/scenery" folder (if you didn't already have it there).
- Copy the "Osiou_Themis_Shop-1.SE1" to the "FS2002/LAGO/FSSE/SCN" folder (you need to have Lago's FSSE installed for this scenery).
- Copy the "Themis Marina.CFG" to the "FS2002/LAGO/FSSoundScape/SoundColls" folder (you need to have Lago's FS Soundscape installed for this scenery).
- Copy the "Surf on sandy beach.wav" to the "FS2002/LAGO/FSSoundScape/Sounds" folder.
- To install the AFCAD file for Themis, drag the "TB4_Afcad.txt" file onto the "AFInstaller.exe" icon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to extend our warmest thanks to the following individuals, for providing us with the tools that allowed us to create this scenery, in the way we did. Thanks very much guys, one and all! :)
- Frank Betts, for his totally awesome macros! The Kounos scenery totally depends on them ...
- Doc George, for his awesome Gaspump macros used at Themis.
- Rafael Garcia Sanchez, for the great NOVA macros used at Themis.
- Doug Pouk for FS Architect, as well as his numerous and fantastic FS Architect Plugins, our primary scenery design tool.
- Christian Fumey for Ground2K, without which there simply would not be a Corinth Canal.
- Lee Swordy for AFCAD; what would FS2002 be like without it?!
- Everyone at LAGO, for FS Scenery Enhancer and FS Soundscape. There is just no limit to how much we enjoy those tools; they have given us more joy than you could possibly imagine ...
- Everyone at MS's Flight Simulator team, for providing this totally amazing and awesome simulated reality, as well as the wonderful ability of adding to and modifying that reality.
THE LEGAL BIT
This scenery is released as freeware, and must always remain so. It is the sole property of its creators. These files should not harm your computer in any way. Any disfunctionality or other system malfunctions believed to have been caused by this package in whole or in part, is USER's Sole Liability and responsibility.
If there are any questions or comments pertaining to this scenery, please feel free to contact us at bjorn_hall_@hotmail.com or tiac@adelphia.net
Enjoy, with our best wishes for fun and safe flying, always!
