Two airports less ordinary

My recent trip to Brazil was the reason for the relatively long time since my last post (sorry for that) but also the opportunity to fly via two slightly unusual airport: Sao-Paolo Congohnas and Rio de Janeiro Santos Dumont, named after Alberto Santos Dumont, a an aviation pioneer.

Both airports are used mostly for national traffic, and during the week-ends the “Aero-Bridge” is used by lot of Brazilian working in Sao-Paulo and living in Rio. Congonhas is located in the center of Sao-Paulo. It is so close to the city that on one end, the approach lights and the ILS’s localizer are built on kind of a bridge above a high-traffic road and some houses. The other end of the runway – the one we landed on – is not less impressive. I took these pictures during the final approach.

The runway’s threshold is just abeam the TAM hangar…

Santos Dumont airport in Rio de Janeiro has much less direct neighbors and is located in a spectacular area: one of the numerous bays of the city. The Sugar Loaf, the famous mountain with the cable car, one of Rio’s landmarks is straight is exactly in the axis of the two parallel runways.

This makes it a perfect place for some plane spotting, and I could not resist. On the other side of the runway, a bridge stretches across the bay, and across the runways’ axis. Approaches and departures exist in both directions, and both are rather un-standard, and partly flown visually. I was seating in row 3, my nose against the window to see as much as possible of this approach, in the night over Rio. I spotted some dark holes about the brightly lit city and thought “clouds” but later realized that they were hills… and we were flying below their summits, sneaking into the airport. From my seat, I could hear the typical Airbus auto-pilot disconnect sound. Pilots must have a lot of fun there, and from a passenger point of view, you can get a good impression how landing on water could look like. My instructor always insisted on the fact that landing before the threshold was a bad thing…

The take-off distance available is perfect for mid-size airliners like the Airbus 320 or the Boeing 737, even if the remaining distance after take-off. Good that these aircraft can climb out on one engine…

Looking at the ballet of aircraft turning the left turn after take-off from the Sugar Loaf is fascinating, and if you ever go to Rio de Janeiro, you should not miss that.