Caracas Chronicles

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.