L'Aéropostale - Port Etienne (Nouadhibou) - Mauritania
History
-----------
In 1919, after WWI, Pierre George Latecoere conceived (and organized) an air post service to allow the post to arrive faster to all the French colonial territories in Africa. The Aéropostale service started with the route Toulouse - Casablanca: 1850 km with Perpignan, Barcellona, Alicante, Malaga, Tanger and Rabat as intermediate legs. The first planes were WW I Salmson with a speed of about 120 km/h, the flight was with no navigational aids and in every kind of weather, flying low following rivers and the coast of Spain down to the Gibraltar Strait. The "Ligne", as it was called, went on step by step in the years, reaching southward Agadir, Cap Juby, Villa Cisneros, Port Etienne, Saint Louis and at last Dakar. The most of the 2850 km to Dakar was over the Sahara, that was at that times occupied by the hostiles Moors. A lot of the pilots of the route were captured by them, and released after a ransom was paid. Those "Blue Warriors" shoot to the planes too, and some of the pilots never came back home. But the motto of the Aèropostale was "le courrier doit passer" (the post must get through) and the corageous pilots and mechanics of those times wrote heroic pages on this route. Mermoz, Daurat, Guillaumet, Saint Exupéry (who was "chef d'escale" of the Cap Juby stop) were the most known pilots in those times, just for their exploit and dramatic adventures in this service.
In 1927 la Ligne crossed the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Saint Louis (Senegal) with Natal, Brazil, then it extended to Buenos Aires, and from there, the following year Mermoz opened the route through the Andes to Chile. In 1930, Air France took up the Aéropostale, and the service kepts on with new records, until WWII outbreak stopped this exalting venture, together with its main characters.
The scenery
------------------
This is the sixth scenery of the Ligne. A place quite similar to Villa Cisneros. A long desert peninsula, an old colonial fort, a small fishermen's town, desert dunes, nomad tents and camels, a sandy airstrip, a hangar and a barrack. Nothing more. I have just one aerial photo of the hangar(!), that I include, and some description of a traveler talking about the airstrip near the old French fort. There wasn't almost anything there, so don'expect too much...;-) - it's an all-fantasy scenery (except for the geographical data and the coastline).
As usual, you can start from the Airport menu, looking for "Port Etienne" entry: or (I suggest you) you can start in flight (load "Approaching Port Etienne" from the flights menu), coming from the Northwest down the coast. Follow the peninsula southward until you see the airstrip.
Anyway:
How to install it:
as usual, that is
1) put the .bgl files into your Aeropostale scenery folder and
4) the .*AF, *.R8 and *.PAT files into the main texture folder.
5) Activate the new scenery from inside FsGW (FS98) in the usual way. Then you should have Port Etienne in the Airport list. Anyway, the coordinates of the scenery are N20.55, W17.02.
The .stn file must go in your FsGW \pilot folder.
Warning: you must have default FS98 Africa regional scenery installed, because my scenery sit on it!
And you must have VOD textures too.
Thanks:
-------------
I would like to thanks all the people of the Old Hangar, whose help and sustain, even indirect, I really appreciated.
and especially:
Del Hopkins, for his useful utility (hope no texture missing this time!) and some textures.
Charles Rousseau for his Latecoere 28 and Breguet XIV (static);
Estepa from Tenerife, Spain, who sent me some useful informations;
Mathias Hinze and Jean Claude Embry for some textures.
Bill Lyon provided us with his fascinating Golden Wings. With no GW, we would now be flying big boring jets at 40,000ft MSL...
Thanks to
- Pascal Meziat, Manfred Moldenhauer for Airport 2.10, Tom Hiscox for the update to 2.60
- Rafael Garcia Sanchez for VOD 3.0
Who else? Excuse me if I forgot someone.
For more informations about Golden Wings, please visit http://www.flightsimmers.net/tommy.
Feel free to send me any comment or information request.
I would like to build up all the scenery of the aerodromes of the Aéropostale line: if someone has any picture or information, please send me by mail at
f_cozzi@yahoo.it
Copyright and Distribution (same old stuff)
--------------------------
This scenery is released as Freeware. Copyright (C) Francesco Cozzi.
As freeware you are permitted to distribute this
archive subject to the following conditions,
- The archive must be distributed without modification to the
contents of the archive. Redistributing this archive with any files
added, removed or modified is prohibited.
- The inclusion of any individual file from this archive in another
archive without the prior permission of the author is prohibited.
- No charge may be made for this archive other than that to cover the
cost of its distribution. If a fee is charged it must be made clear
to the purchaser that the archive is freeware and that the fee is to
cover the distributor's costs of providing the archive.
- The authors' rights and wishes concerning this archive must be
respected.
