St Lucia visit - late January 2024
Jan 30, 2024 14:32:54 GMT
graham, christoff, and 2 more like this
Post by airsicksteve on Jan 30, 2024 14:32:54 GMT
Good folk of AFA
Having broken cover from what seems like years of lurking, I offer a fairly thin report from St Lucia, having just returned from a short break.
It wasn’t a dedicated spotting trip, so apologies for the lack of quantity and quality.
St Lucia is among the Eastern Caribbean islands, so has its fair share of inter-island ‘domestic’ traffic, together with regular tourist flights from mainland US / Canada and the UK.
Vieux Fort Airport (UVF) is situated on the far Southern end of the island and serves all of the big jet traffic. Smaller - mainly turbo prop island feeders and smaller exec jets - use Castries (SLU) airport, on the northern end. It being only a short holiday break meant that I wasn’t able to visit Castries airport.
Airlines using Vieux Fort (UVF) include regular US lines American / Delta / jetBlue; plus WestJet & Rouge (Canada of course
), all using smaller Boeing and Airbus variants. The only other country with regular scheduled services is the U.K., with Virgin / BA and occasionally Tui providing A333 / B772 and B789s respectively. A weekly AmeriJet B763 visits on inter-island freight shuttles.There are on average 10 to 15 commercial inbounds daily, usually from 1400 local, until the last BA 772 at around 1930. Nothing much seems to happen in the mornings, save for very occasional exec jets.
With a lot of forest canopy covering the island, steep ravines and quite a lot of rainforest clouds and haze, it’s very difficult to get a good spotting position, unless you sit on an open patch at the far south of the island. All approaches were directly from the west, to the main runway 10 at Vieux Fort, descending eastbound along the coast. The general view of the airport from the south road is open and uncluttered, although the authorities are rightly suspicious of loitering near any permitter fences with bins or cameras.
Inland (where we were staying), it’s nigh on impossible to get any views of low-level inbounds (outbounds similarly go straight out to sea to the east on departure). No overflys seem to generate any contrails and a lot of prop traffic was heard, but lost in the haze, cloud and greenery of the surroundings.
Good old FR24 and its playbacks from timed sightings filled the gaps in the commercial traffic seen. Most exec jets were ‘blocked’, so went unrecorded.
G-VGEM A333 Virgin (our chariot)
G-VIIU B772 BA
C-GITR A320 Rouge (went tech on departure and returned o/n)
J6-AAM
J6-AAN AS350B Squirrels (operating scenic flights daily across the island out of Castries)
J6-AAQ
J6-AAR
J8-VBQ DHC-6-300 Air Adelphi
C-GSWJ B737 WestJet (ohd from Bridgetown)
N963HL C208B Feeder DHL
N849FE C208B Feeder FedEx
N966HL C208B Feeder DHL
N989AU A321 American
C-FYJG A319 Rouge
N998JE A321 jetBlue
N6708D B752 Delta
N856DN B739 Delta (tech on stand for several days)
J8-RAF DHC-6-300 Air Adelphi
PP-OSM FA7X
N828JF Falcon 50
N152EZ Gulf 5
N566CL PA28-180 (wfu 03/2022 and now weed covered off apron)
G-VIIR B772 BA
G-VWAG A333 Virgin (chariot home)
Thanks for getting this far without narcolepsy. Just casual spottings as they happened, just to give a flavour of the island. e&oe
