Flight 37: Sydney to Stephenville

Turbo Duke at Stephenville Newfoundland (CYJT)

The morning finds us leaving Sydney, and Nova Scotia, for the shores of Newfoundland.  There are not many airfields in Newfoundland, and I will be visiting most of them.  My first stop will be in Stephenville:

Stephenville (Canada 2011 Census population 6,719) is a Canadian town in Newfoundland and Labrador on the west coast of the island of Newfoundland.  The town functions as a local service centre for the southwestern part of the island, serving a direct population of 25,000 people from surrounding areas and over 90,000 people along the entire west coast of the island.
Stephenville has a modern 40-bed hospital (built in 2003), schools, stores, banks and government institutions. The provincial community college system, College of the North Atlantic, is headquartered in Stephenville and maintains a campus there for students from the southwestern region of the island. A provincial minimum security jail is also located in the town.

The Stephenville International Airport, formerly Ernest Harmon AFB, serves the entire west coast of the island - a catchment population of 90,000 people from Port aux Basques to St. Anthony, currently offering intraprovincial flights with Provincial Airlines, weekly summer air service is offered to Toronto with Sunwing Airlines, twice weekly international flights are offered to Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, France in February, June and August with Air Saint Pierre, weekly flights to Halifax, Ottawa and Toronto with Porter Airlines connecting to its network in Canada and the U.S.A. As well, Stephenville Airport is an international port of entry airport; the airport is the alternate refueling airport to Gander International.

It was built by the United States Air Force and operated as Ernest Harmon Air Force Base from 1941-1966.  In 1941 the United States obtained rights to construct a United States Army Air Forces base in the St. George's Bay area of Newfoundland. The U.S. 76th Congress approved the 99-year lease and in April 1941, construction began.  The mandate of the base was to maintain a tanker alert force and its capability to meet and refuel Strategic Air Command jet bombers en route to targets. The Boeing KC-97 Stratofreighter was employed in this task.

Most of today's flight was over water:  the Cabot Strait.  Stephenville has one ILS runway, runway 27.  The weather was overcast, and I flew to an altitude of 12,000 feet to get over the clouds.  (Most of this trip has been at lower altitudes, typically 2000 feet above ground level, so I can actually see what I am flying over.)

The Sydney scenery is produced by Simaddons and is found in the Halifax base pack.

I was going to use the Stephenville scenery which appears in the VFR Shortfields of Newfoundland addon, but it did not install correctly into Flight Simulator, so I ended up getting the default scenery instead.  The installer for this package is not very good.  First it wants to install into the default directory for Microsoft Flight Simulator, which I don't use because it causes problems.