BOG-MDE in AeroRepública with pix

[Aces320]

Flight P57502

Date: April 3 2004
Scheduled Departure time: 07:50am
Actual Departure time: 8:00am

Scheduled Arrival time: 8:20am
Actual Arrival time about 8:30am

Seat: 9F

Aircraft: MD-83 VP-BGL

AeroRepública deserves...mm 4stars out of 5 in this flight

I woke up at 4:45am.... and i couldn't sleep at all, as i usually do when i'm going to travel, i got dressed fastly, and waited till my parents were ready, in the meantime, i watched F1 Bahrain clasiffication stuff.

At about 5:30am, we went up to Eldorado Airport, the ride was fast, as at that time in the morning, the traffic is just taxis going to the airport...

We arrived to the airport at 6 o'clock in the morning, my mum did the check in stuff...and BOG was FULL!!.... all flights to USA and other destinations, depart at the same time in the morning, so the check in hall was a complete chaos... we checked in fastly and without any mayor problems.

My mum met some friends of her, and she talked with them, their daughter was flying with Aerorepublica to Cartagena that day also, we went up to the second floor, and i went to the McDonald's besides the Regional airside, i watched the regional aircraft, Fokker 50s from AV... some Dash8s from Aires...and a WCA ATR42.

After i had my breakfast, we went to the National Concurse...
it was a complete chaos also, due to the airport being closed because of the fog... all aircraft to the US were parked in the international Concurse
( DL 757, AA A300, CO737,CO757, AV757) and some Copa 737-800 with winglets...looked awesome!

Soon...all of them were slowly departing, first CO...then AA....then DL..MX..AV(if it wast delayed) and then...CM


I was very entretained watching those planes...then i got bored and i started to read my book.... finally the aerorepublica flights started to be boarded... first Cali...and then us ... to Medellin, the Cali guys were doing a line, but they didn't boarded...dunno why, while i lined up, i started to look to the woman in fron of me, it was beautiful, i thought she was just another awesome "paisita"...then my mum told me she was Paula Betancur...a colombian top model


we boarded the aircraft....and fastly we were towed towards the stand by zone in front of CATAM Colombian AirForce base, i watched the old airforce 1 and a pair of Hercules parked in the apron, besides the WCA MD-81



then the engines started to run, and we headed to RWY 13R...as we did this...i took this pic...

While we taxied, i watched the airmuseum....and finally we arrived to the thereshold... an AV MD-83 was damaged and parked there.... ...

then the engines took more power...but we waited till this plane landed


after the AV MD-83 cleared the runway....we took off, we turned right, towards the south...and it was a rather bumpy ride.... like 10 minutes later we got stabilized, and the meal service started, it was a packed sandwich( it was nice.... ) and a pepsi cola...i repeated pepsi...as i was thirsty ... from the sky...it looked like if Colombia was a sole cloud..

...BTW...here's the interior of the craft....its weird it had warnings in italian... and the seat covers of an AA aircraft


I'm going to show you our approach to MDE through Antioquia in pics...












...and then we got closer,,,and closer to the ground....we passed over the ILS lights and a motorway...and finally we landed.

then we headed to the desserted terminal....only an AA757 was present besides us.





i really love this terminal... sadly is so...empty



I hope you liked my 1st trip report

[uy707]

Nice report, btw where are the pictures. Were they spilled en route ?
Alain