By Jean-Michel Guhl
La Paz, Bolivia, 18 November 2015 — An Airbus C295W aircraft belonging to the Mexican Navy (SEMAR) and operated by a mixed crew from Airbus Defence and Space and SEMAR has carried out demonstration flights in El Alto, La Paz, Bolivia, one of the airports with the most extreme hot and high conditions in the world during the austral spring and summer seasons.
Anyone who has traveled to Bolivia surely remembers how strange it is not to descend but to go up in order to land at La Paz, the country largest city and economic capital. El Alto International airport or LPB, situated 13 km sout-west of La Paz, is the highest international airport in the world with its landing strips pitched at 4,062 metres (13,327 ft) above sea level. Indeed as one of the world’s highest altitude international airport, El Alto offers unique features that aircraft manufacturers such as Airbus and Boeing take advantage of to test high-altitude as well as cold weather flights. The average temperature at the airport is however quite cold: 6°C (43 °F). LPB today has two runways: the main one “10R/28L” has a concrete surface and is 4,000 metres (13,123 ft) long, allowing large aircraft operations at higher altitudes. A second runway, “10L/28R” is located parallel to the main runway and has a grass surface used by light aircraft.
The C295W, which landed at El Alto International Airport on Tuesday, has also performed flights to the Cochabamba Jorge Wilstermann International Airport, situated at a lower altitude of 2,548 metres, as well as to the unprepared runway of Capitán Germán Quiroga Guardia Airport in San Borja (elevation : 240m), which has both a 1,800m asphalt runway alongside a more spartan unprepared strip used by light aircraft.
The new C295W version is equipped with winglets, which allow transport of more payload over larger distances in hot and high conditions and which result in fuel savings of around 4%. “The highly successful demonstration by the C295W in Bolivia this week underlines again its excellent performance in hot and high conditions, which is key for several countries in South America. It demonstrates once more the C295W’s status as the most efficient aircraft in its category”, said Christophe Roux, Head of Airbus Defence and Space in Latin America. The C295W’s tour of the region will include stops in several Latin American countries before returning to Mexico in early December.
Costing less than $30 million, the Airbus (formerly CASA) C295 is one of the most successful and flexible medium twin-turboprop tactical military transport aircraft in service today, thanks to its rear ramp. Affordable, reliable and rugged, it is presently used by some twenty different air arms around the world including five in Latin America. ♦
