For this week’s iteration of No Money Mondays, we take a trip down to Bella Coola to take a look at the Machmell Fisheries scenery by well-established bush strip developer PropStrike studio. The scenery is perfect for anyone wanting to get their tires dirty on a short, challenging gravel strip; the scenery features some of the highest quality vegetation in X-plane as well as high-quality buildings. Headed by dynamic duo Karl Hoybye and Luciano Pommella, the developers released their debut scenery work back in 2018 with Quatum River.

In 1998 The Machmell Fisheries was opened and surveyed by helicopters when researchers from the department of fisheries had to measure water levels and study fish in the nearby creek. The result was the Machmell Fisheries Camp, a 900m long narrow bush strip 44 nautical miles south of Bella Coola. The strip is especially challenging because of the runway being surrounded by trees and water on one side.

For people who want to take it one step further, the beach is fully modeled and can be used as a landing site for anyone wanting to challenge their skills and have some fun in the process. Furthermore, the scenery comes with deeply detailed hand-painted ground textures, as well as custom modeled vegetation such as grass, trees, shrubs, and bushes, giving the user a sight to behold when flying near the airport. Adding to that the airport utilizes only custom-made objects, requiring no libraries to be installed. The full feature list can be found here. 

Features:

• Hand-painted custom ground textures at a 10/cm pixel resolution. 
• Highly accurate 3D vegetation including grass, shrubs, bushes, and trees. 
• Dock for seaplane operations. 
• Hundreds of clutter objects in many variations.
• Forest clearing with cabin and helipad. 
• Only uses custom-made objects. No libraries are needed.

From my experience with this scenery, it is particularly extraordinary that no detail gets lost, whether you’re either in the sky or on the ground, you are provided with one of the best models seen to date. Combine the modeling with the location and you have a highly realistic representation of what bush flying in the north can be like. Furthermore, the scenery has a lot in store for any type of pilot, whether you like short bush trips or some casual flying, there is more than enough fun to be had, provided you don’t smash into the trees when landing(been there, done that). 

If you’re like me and cant get enough of this scenery, PropStrike Studio has announced a new scenery a while ago, the scenery covers another special location, the developer has been quiet for some time now, but you can find more information on the topic in a previous article.

We covered their release three years ago, (granted we weren’t as developed back then + old formatting with missing/broken images and text), if you’d like to quell your bush flying tingles, The Machmell Fisheries camp can be downloaded from the PropStrike studio website.