If You Build Airports, Will Airplanes Come? | Aviation International News

If You Build Airports, Will Airplanes Come?

New airports could drive growing business aviation activity in Brazil.

he Catarina Executive Airport is part of a larger project by JHSF on a sizable plot of land straddling the highway leading west from São Paulo to Sorocaba. On one side of the highway, JHSF completed and operates a fashion outlet mall, and half a dozen additional plots await office towers, hotels, or other uses. Across the highway is the airport and beyond it and so far just on paper, an eventual luxury condominium development, not JHFS's first. Catarina Executive Airport began as a fast-track project that was to be ready for the 2014 World Cup, and then the 2016 Olympics, including not only an 8,000-foot main runway, enabling the largest intercontinental private jets to arrive directly at the airport, but also an auxiliary runway, and an airport terminal and space for FBOs, MROs, and private hangars.

By Richard Pedicini • Contributor - South America

August 15, 2018

While Brazil’s economy has become more stable over the last two decades, it still swings between boom and bust. The upcoming presidential election has injected additional uncertainty, with vendors all singing the same tune: once exchange rates stabilize and any candidate wins, customers will start making buying decisions again. But how do economic swings, and especially long downward ones like the recession from which the country is only now recovering, affect people who don’t just buy and sell but must make large, long-term investments? AIN spoke with long-term infrastructure projects Aerovale, Catarina Executive Airport, and WWA World Way Aviation, the largest FBO in Brazil. Aerovale and WWA are privately financed, while Catarina is a project of publicly held luxury construction firm JHSF.

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