SPJC - SPPY

Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chávez - Aeropuerto de Chachapoyas

We continue our hopping around the Andes, this time moving to norther Peru to Chachapoyas.

The departure from Lima was uneventful, but the weather is more complicated now. We have had perfect weather all the way up from Ushuaia, but since we got to Peru things are a bit more serious.

Our departure procedure takes us first to the water, so we have plenty of room to climb and clear the height of the nearest mountains.

The weather report for the whole trip is crap. Thunderstorms across the Andes are everywhere:

We clear the thunderstorms by cruising at 25000ft, but Chachapoyas is an airport nested in the Andes themselves, resting at 8000ft. It does offer an instrument arrival procedure, but it has no ILS for an instrumented landing. As I configure the arrival procedure in the FMS, it’s clear that the arrival is going to be difficult:

This is the arrival procedure, with the weather data in overlay. Not good. Red is bad, and purple is the worst. We need to start our descent now, and get very close to severe thunderstorms in the vicinity. We’ll have to skirt those thunderstorms somehow. Also, the ceiling is very low, so visibility as we approach the airport will be a problem. Remember, we have an instrumented arrival but there is no ILS for the runway, so the final approach needs to be visual.

First, we need to avoid the thunderstorms:

We do manage to avoid them all, but as we get into the cloud layer, visibility goes to zero and it never improves:

As we finish the instrumented arrival procedure, we arrive at the decision point. Here, we need to decide if we continue with the final approach or abort. We are currently at 1500ft above ground level, and 3.5nm away from the airfield, and we still dont see anything. It was clear that landing here would be impossible. The decision point is reached and, with not even the airport lights in sight, it’s time to abort the approach.

We will proceed to our alternate airport, Chiclayo, which is in the coast. We climb back up to 21000ft and proceed west to the coast. As we start leaving the mountains, the weather clears up nicely:

And we land safely:

We are back in the coast, but we’ll be back in the Andes. This is our last stop in Peru. Next up is Ecuador.