We arrived at the Ibis Hotel at Sao Paulo Congonhas at 11:50AM and they said they couldn’t check us
in until Midday and whilst understanding the rooms we were looking for they
could not guarantee they would be available. 10 minutes later at exactly midday
they checked us in and allocated us an airport facing room. Congonhas is an awesome downtown airport
probably best described as a cross between London City and Chicago Midway. It
operates from about 06:00 – 23:00 each day and with a limited amount of stands
aircraft don’t hang around too long GOL, LATAM and Azul all operate here, there
are also some FBO facilities and hangars across on the far side and a number of
biz can be read off but we don’t do biz so that made life more relaxing.
Between 12:00 and about 21:00 with a brief break to sample the soup buffet, who
knew there was such a thing, we logged 107 unique frames and I made 69 of them.
It was also possible to see some Guarulhos outbounds as they passed over the
hotel which added a few to the total from there. It was during our time at Congonhas
that we discovered
that the older aircraft in Brazil are not fitted with the latest ADSB equipment
and coverage close to the ground is erratic meaning that it’s not always clear
which airport they are headed to, aircraft affected by this are the freighters,
various operators ATR’s and the AZUL E190’s