Air
The Falkland Islands have two airports with paved runways. The main international airport is RAF Mount Pleasant, 27 miles (43 km) west of Stanley. LAN Airlines operate weekly flights to Santiago, Chile, via Punta Arenas. Once a month, this flight also stops in Río Gallegos, Argentina.
The Royal Air Force operates flights from RAF Mount Pleasant to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, England, with a refuelling stop at RAF Ascension Island. As of 2011 Air Seychelles operates the RAF air link, using Boeing 767s. British International (BRINTEL) also operate two Sikorsky S61N helicopters, based at RAF Mount Pleasant, under contract to the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, primarily for moving military personnel, equipment and supplies around the islands.
The smaller Port Stanley Airport, outside the city, is used mainly for internal flights. The Falkland Islands Government Air Service (FIGAS) operates Islander aircraft that can use the grass airstrips that most settlements have. Flight schedules are decided a day in advance according to passenger needs and the next day's timetable is published every evening. The schedules are based on three routes - a Northern Shuttle and the Southern Shuttle that each have one flight a day and the East - West Shuttle that has a morning and an evening flight every day.
The British Antarctic Survey operates a transcontinental air link between Port Stanley Airport and the Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula and servicing also other British bases in the British Antarctic Territory using a de Havilland Canada Dash 7.
Read more about this topic: Transport In The Falkland Islands
Famous quotes containing the word air:
“There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.”
—Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)