SCPE - SLUY
It’s a beautiful day today as well to do a VFR flight, so we take off from San Pedro de Atacama airfield and make our way to Bolivia.
Bolivia hosts some of the highest airports in the world, so it will be interesting to see how the plane performs high-altitude takeoffs and landings.
In general, planes perform worse at higher altitudes. Regardless of the type of plane, their performance decreases dramatically with altitude. This is because the air up there is less dense, so less thrust is generated by the propulsion. Regardless of a piston engine, a turboprop, or a turbofan airplane, they all perform worse.
Piston engine planes suffer the most from altitude, and many of them already have difficulties operating at 10’000ft or above. The TBM, being a turboprop, suffers less from this phenomenon but still you want to make sure your runways and weight are ok for the planes operating performance.
Again, the landscape on the Chilean north does not fail to impress:
We are heading to Uyuni and its airport, La Joya Andina (the jewel of the Andes). Uyuni is next to a wonder of the world: the Uyuni salt flat, which happen to be the world’s largest too. Uyuni’s airport is at an extreme high altitude: 12’024ft, or 3’665 meters.
It’s a visual flight, so we’ll take a bit of a detour to the north and explore the salt flats:
