Brazilian business aviation association ABAG will not publish a new version of its Brazilian Yearbook of General Aviation this year – despite having produced an annual edition for each of the previous five LABACE shows, which it organizes. This year’s show opens at São Paulo’s Congonhas Airport on August 30 and runs through September 1.
In the past the Yearbook has presented progressively more data, building on the previous calendar year and accompanied by analysis in both English and Portuguese. This year there is no new edition, and no easy way to find such information as fleet size and value.
However, data on airport movements is now available from Decea, the Air Force’s Department of Air Space Control, in its own 232-page online yearbook. Statistics in the latest issue paint a grim picture of Brazil’s business aviation sector, especially for rotary-wing activity, with operations down by nearly a third at major airports in the past two years for which numbers are available.
For the country’s two busiest business aviation airports, Decea’s numbers show that at Campo de Marte in São Paulo traffic declined by 23 percent from 2013 to 2015, while Jacarepaguá in Rio de Janeiro declined 29 percent over the same period.
At airports serving both commercial and general aviation, numbers may reflect what slots are allotted, rather than demand. Congonhas Airport saw traffic climb by 2.5 percent last year (on the heels of a 3-percent slide in 2014), but business aviation at Congonhas dropped 9.6 percent in 2014 and another 16 percent last year, for a compound decline of 24.1 percent.
At Rio’s downtown Santos Dumont Airport, the decline was even sharper: 18.1 percent in 2014 and 27.2 percent last year, for a compound decline of 40.4 percent in two years. Some 15 percent of Santos Dumont’s general aviation flights are to or from Congonhas.
Helicopter services to the offshore oil and gas sector have been particularly hard hit by Brazil’s political corruption scandal, since state oil company Petrobras is a major focus. This brought all contracts under scrutiny even before oil prices dropped.
Jacarepaguá serves the offshore platforms, and helicopter traffic there declined by 13.4 percent in 2014 and by a further 22.7 percent last year, for a compound drop of 33 percent in two years. The airport’s fixed-wing operations showed an accelerating decline also, at 6.8 percent in 2014 and 12.9 percent last year.
Campo de Marte serves no offshore platforms but the decline in rotary-wing flights there was even steeper, 21.2 percent in 2014 and 15.4 percent in 2015, for a compound drop of 33.3 percent. In contrast, fixed-wing operations at Campo de Marte were down by only 3 percent over the two-year period.
ABAG yearbooks in past years have shown the composition, age and value of the fleet, as well as use and geographical base, allowing the reader to differentiate flights by new jets or turboprops from those of piston-engine aircraft.
Figures such as those available from the country’s air force confirm that the Brazilian business aviation fleet has declined in both size and value since the end of 2014, the most recent data in the last ABAG Yearbook. There appears to be some unwillingness to acknowledge that decline, however, and this is one possible explanation for the lack of a new edition this year.
The Decea yearbook is good for its purpose, which is to measure air traffic activity. The ABAG yearbook, while based on the same raw traffic data, combined that data with other information such as ANAC records to produce a useful portrait of the evolution of Brazilian business aviation.
Another barometer of activity is flight training, and instructional flights represent a significant portion of general aviation activity, exceeding charter flights in Brazil. While the Decea statistics show flights that land where they took off, as well as touch-and-goes typical of instruction, those numbers would also include sightseeing flights. No national totals are provided.
Finally, there seems to be no definitive source of data for business aviation for Latin America as a whole that includes both international and domestic operations.