The oldest conundrums, and it’s not prostitution

Sergio Gaudenzi, who is currently heading INFRAERO (the state ill-runner of our airports) stated that our Brazilian airports are bereft of nothing Heathrow, Schiphol and JFK are also bereft of. So in case he needs a help I decided to elicit some of our major gridlocks at the moment. The same old conundrums of the past 20 years, but for INFRAERO they have just passed unnoticed. I told you it had nothing to do with kerb-crawling!

I live in the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, which borders Argentina and Uruguay. In a sense we feel deeply more attached to Argentinean and Uruguayan culture than to the Brazilian. Our Portuguese here features some Spanish words and accents which we feel utterly oblivious of, such is the normality of employing them in everyday conversations. In our winter thermometers drop to around 0ºC and mists and fogs are commonplace. It is very common here to have an airport closed either for lack of visibility or ceiling and only last year INFRAERO bid the installation of ILS CAT II. The installation was to take place in the summer months (from December to February) so that it could be already operative by when the winter approached. What went wrong you might be asking yourself, because surely something did go wrong. They decided to install the ILS in the winter and so the airport was closed not only because of meteorological conditions but also because of the testing. People queued at the airport, flip-flops where made and rampant fuming took place in the media with passengers punching airline employees, mistaken for root of the problems. Airlines don’t want to take off with us, they are stealing our money, moaned some.

This is not the only problem we have here in Rio Grande do Sul. Porto Alegre’s Salgado Filho International is the only IFR aerodrome operating 24-7 in our state. All the others (2) are part-time operations and one of them is within a 27nm range of Porto Alegre, which excludes it as an alternative. That’s right Caxias do Sul’s Campo dos Bugres is inside our TMA. The closest alternative we have 24-7 operative is Florianópolis’s Hercílio Luz, 180nm away from here.

Porto Alegre lacks a longer and wider runway. In the early 90s Salgado Filho was a common alternative to European and American airlines which unable to get to Argentina for meteorological reasons, harboured in Porto Alegre, nearly 55-minutes away from Buenos Aires by flight. John Kennedy once stopped over forcedly and had a cup of coffee in our old terminal. It was the biggest event in Porto Alegre, a not very eventful metropolis, since João Goulart, an ex-president of ours forbade girls from wearing bikini on the televisioned Miss contests. And at the time there was no such thing as a ‘brazilian wax’.

The thing is that now we cannot be used as alternative because it was only later realised that out runway 42 metres wide could not be certified ILS CAT II because this systems requires at least 45 metres of width. This is of the utmost importance as once a Lufthansa 747 took part of the grass encircling the runway with its outer jet engines, and as a British Airways got stuck in the runway because there was no angle and runway width for the airplane to turn at the end of the threshold. So it had to be towed with passengers onboard.

Other problems haunt other major Brazilian airports. If you decide to wing to Rio chances are you might get drowned in Santos Dumont, an Island, as it is one of the shortest runways available (1200m) and you may find water (sewage basically) either when landing or when taking off. Let’s say you decide to wing to Tom Jobim, another airport a bit away. Chances are you get shot by riffle-totting drug barons who ‘exchange bullets’ across the Linha Vermelha (the Red Line). During Rio’s Pan American, the Red Line had its name altered to Yellow Line, so that no records could be retrieved regarding security matters. For Olympic reasons...

If you are heading to São Paulo, things are not any better. Congonhas is Santos Dumont’s counterpart. The runway is short and chances are you may find a very busy, always jammed avenue at one end or tons of residential buildings and petrol depots on the other. What differs the two of them is that Santos Dummont is encircled by Guanabara Bay's sewage whereas Congonhas is encircled by illegal buildings and brothels legally bid by the government. Guarulhos is the largest in São Paulo. If you land in Guarulhos, you are very likely to get lost in the terminal (for lack of direction and senseless connections)or if you manage to somehow find your way out of the terminal, at least 2 hours will be spent stuck in the traffic jam because there is no other option for getting into or out of the airport, but for the good old road. No express trains such as Rome’s Leonardo Express or Gatwick Express, no monorails, no tubes, no bus lanes. Nothing. And it is our major hub.

Yep, just like Heathrow.