They named him Eyjafjallajökull. That happened 20 years before the eruption of that volcano went around the world and completely stopped aviation in Europe for several days in that spring of 2010. His life ended definitively this week in Lleida-Alguaire: a powerful machine did so. scrapped.
The Eyjafjallajökull that ended its days at the Catalan airport was a Boeing 757 that Icelandair, an Icelandic airline, bought new from Boeing Airplanes in 1990. It flew uninterruptedly until 2005 and from then on, without ceasing to belong to the company based In Reykjavík, the reactor was flying rented for different companies in Colombia, the United Kingdom, Papua New Guinea, France, and Venezuela.
Its last operator was the African Cabo Verde Airlines, in which precisely the Icelandic airlines entered as shareholders at the end of 2019. They wanted to take advantage of an interesting period of privatization of different government assets based in Praia. The plans with the new ownership were ambitious... although in a few weeks Covid arrived, with the forced cessation of operations.
The aircraft was parked for almost two years at the Amílcar Cabral International Airport, the most important in the country, located on the island of Sal. Finally, Iceland decided that the Lleida airport would be a much better place to keep the plane, for which led to a special flight being prepared between the Amilcar Cabral and Alguaire at the end of 2022. That landing in Lleida ended up being the last of the device that bore the registration number D4-CCG and had been renamed: instead of bearing the name of the difficult-to-pronounce volcano , ended up being called Tarrafal Bay, an area of beaches north of the country's capital with a certain sinister past from colonial times and the Portuguese dictatorship, although that is another story.
The decision to move the 757 to the Lleida airport may initially seem strange, although it has its explanation: the facility of the public company Aeroports de Catalunya has specialized in industrial and training activities: from aircraft maintenance and conservation to the development of non-standard aircraft. manned, production of new fuels or training of pilots and maintenance technicians.
All this diversification arises from the need to have more activity than purely commercial activity, which is what the airport was initially prepared for. This was inaugurated by José Montilla on January 17, 2010. The then president of the Generalitat and a group of authorities arrived aboard an Airbus A320 of the Vueling company from Barcelona. Alguaire was then opened to commercial air traffic. It was the same year that the Eyjafjallajökull volcano last erupted, although the airport was not particularly affected, as it only had a handful of flights that ended up being cancelled.
To avoid as much as possible that Lleida does not become a ghost airport like that of Ciudad Real or Castellón in its first years (its current management has nothing to do with that of the times of Carlos Fabra), the team of the Catalan public company searched high and low for all options to convert a commercial airport, which was nowhere near giving the results imagined, into an industrial platform with an excellent flight runway and an immense amount of land to implement new companies and initiatives in the sector. .
The Cape Verde Boeing has been dismantled by Servitec, a company specialized in maintenance, conservation and recycling of aircraft that last year recycled half a dozen similar aircraft. The company, whose parent company is Aviaction, works on four continents and has fixed bases in Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza and
Alguaire, where it is one of the 19 companies installed, three more than in 2022. These companies have generated 282 direct jobs at an airport that last year had close to 100 students in training, both future aviators and aeronautical maintenance technicians. Tests with unmanned aircraft and rocket engines are also carried out at the airport. In the latter case, 52 days of 2023 were dedicated to it.
The airport has not abandoned its origins and continues to have commercial activity with a terminal that is more than adjusted to the needs of the traffic it manages. Last year, 31,131 passengers used its facilities, most of whom used the regular flights that Air Nostrum maintains all year round with Palma, which are extended in the summer season to Ibiza and Menorca. Air Nostrum also flies to the other Aeroports de Catalunya facility in the same province: Andorra-La Seu. In 2023, 9,380 travelers arrived on commercial flights.
Finally, among the operations of regular flights, charter, private aviation and the historic Lleida aeroclub, in addition to the training flights and aircraft that arrive in Lleida for maintenance, in 2023, 17,403 takeoffs and landings were recorded on the Alguaire runway.
That of the 757, which no longer exists as of this week, was one of the 15,859 operations in 2022: the landing of a Boeing built 34 years ago, which was first a volcano, then a bay and which did not take off again.
