FSX – South Florida and the Bahamas Water Class

FSX – South Florida and the Bahamas Water Class. Looking out of the Virtual Cockpit Window in FSX whilst flying around in the Bahamas and the Florida Keys just didn’t look the same as in real life. I suspect that MS may have used sea surface temperatures in an automated method to generate the water class files used for the region. They may have utilized some artistic license for aesthetics for some of the areas of interest. UTX-TAC was released and cleaned up many of the island location errors, but the Water Class is essentially a rehash of the FSX rendition.

What was missing? The correct rendition of the Bahama Bank, Cay Sal Bank and the Tongue of the Ocean to name a few. South Florida and The Bahamas Water Class scenery now replaces the currently available water class scenery with accurately placed water class tiles representing the ocean bottom visibilities thru the clear tropical waters. Low and slow VFR and Commercial Jetliner pilots will now see the sandy banks, reefs and shoals prevalent throughout the region.

The coverage area begins in the western end of the Florida Keys at The Dry Tortugas, heads north to Tampa, over to Grand Bahama, south to the Cay Sal Bank and eastward to Great Inagua covering all of the Florida Keys and the entire Bahamas Island chain.

For those pilots with REX Essentials + Overdrive (REX3), a section of this manual is devoted to creating a custom selection of REX3 and FSX textures to accurately model the many shallow water coral, sandy bottom shoals, coral reefs and also the underwater cliffs that drop off into the deep dark blue abyss. South Florida and The Bahamas Water Class combined with the customizing of your REX3 tropical water textures is able to render the sea channel cuts as they are in real life flowing from the Florida Bay between the Keys and under the Overseas Highway bridges into the Strait of Florida. A rendering of similar cuts at Andros Island in the Bahamas is also the result. The illusion of the ocean floor rolling up to the Keys and Cays is very observable.

The scenery also corrects island position errors in the Dry Tortugas, on the Cay Sal Bank, adding the missing Cays there and also on the Bahama Bank. Lighthouse placement error corrections are also included. All of these FSX errors just mentioned were neglected by UTX-USA and UTX-TAC.

By Wally-Bob

9.5 MB