Welcome, invisible commercial passengers
Back in March 2014, Vice-President Jorge Arreaza formally re-opened the Bartolome Salom Airport in Puerto Cabello, after spending ten years closed. With almost a year or remodelling works and a large investment, the airport started to receive domestic flights later that month and planned to get international flights as well in the forseeable future.
More than ten months later, how’s the Puerto Cabello airport doing?
To get an answer here’s this report from El Carabobeño’s Cindy Rodríguez, who gives us details about the low activity in the new terminal: Six months after commercial flights started, both airlines (Conviasa and Aeropostal) simply suspended their services, without giving a clear idea of when they will restart their operations again.
Only private flights are now arriving and departing from there. But the airport’s runway isn’t in better conditions, as it lacks an appropriate lighting system to allow activities at night-time. The announced plans to expand the landing strip in order to allow cargo planes are also on indefinite hold.
Sadly, the situation of Puerto Cabello Airport isn’t an exceptional case: 2014 was quite a bad year for the Venezuelan air sector and looks like 2015 won’t be much better. With time, all of our airports could face a very similar scenario.
Caracas Chronicles 
You want to hear something just as worse ?
The towns of Tucacas and Chichiriviche in the Falcon State, nice tourist towns with high tourist potential had its airport eliminated, they covered it with cement with popular housing. What king of government has an airport eliminated ?
Javier
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The Tucacas airport was very dangerous. You had to be out of the plane in less than 20 minutes if you did not want to know the “local welcome crew”. Leaving the airplane overnight was consider a donation for the airport guards.
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What airport guards?, that landing strip was barely used even by the bigwigs with ranches nearby. The strip was full of weeds, seldom cleaned and never repaved. No office or security structure at all. Not that any of this is a reason for eliminating it for housing . I think it was one of the few places not to get flooded in heavy rains so maybe THAT is the reason for the housing
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I had heard back at the start of last year that the terminal was being revamped for passenger traffic……but then nothing, no planes, nothing but silence. And I had assumed that the airport was just continuing on as the storage site for new Chery cars for the party faithful and military along with Yutong busses to transport el publo to rallies and new Toyota Land Cruisers to be used by the GNB in their repression operations.
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“Anuncian remodelación del Aeropuerto de Puerto Cabello para convertirlo en terminal internacional “: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLfRungaqy0
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In aviation terms, this field would be a good alternate to Maiquetia (SVMI/CCS), same case applies to Higuerote (SVHG/HIU)…just in case they finish the some day the announced terminal, runway and other facilities remodeling.
“Potenciarán turismo en Higuerote gracias a remodelación del aeropuerto “:
http://notidespegue.com/index.php/noticias/nacionales/item/199-potenciaran-turismo-en-higuerote-gracias-a-remodelacion-del-aeropuerto
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