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Andrew Feinberg
White House Correspondent
Four years after flights from South America’s main air hub to the Falkland Islands were axed, the route is set to resume – though so far no start date has been decided.
A weekly link on Latam from Sao Paulo in Brazil via Cordoba in Argentina to Mount Pleasant airport on East Falkland was launched in November 2019.
While the regular RAF service continued, the new link was cheaper and, according to some regular passengers, more comfortable.
During the ensuing three months of the southern summer, the flights delivered many hundreds of tourists to the islands – to the point that Matt Ware, spokesperson for Falkland Islands government in London, said: “We are getting full.”
But the issue of overtourism was extremely short lived – the Covid pandemic put paid to the flights.
Even though the Falkland Islands appeared on the UK’s first “green list” of quarantine-free locations in 2021, the archipelago was inaccessible to regular tourists.
A weekly Latam link from Santiago in Chile via Punta Arenas to the Falklands has resumed, but journeys from the UK are much quicker and cheaper via Sao Paulo.
A new “cooperation agreement” signed between the Falkland Islands Government and the Argentinian authorities tackles a range of issues – includes the resumption of the weekly flight from Sao Paulo in Brazil via Argentina to Mount Pleasant.
“The resumption of the weekly São Paulo–Mount Pleasant flight will continue to strengthen our economy, tourism, and connectivity to South America and beyond, said Jack Ford, the chair of the Legislative Assembly for the British Overseas Territory.
“We look forward to being able to announce a timeline for the return of this connection, though this is subject to ongoing discussions with the airlines.”
A key element of the flight is to allow Argentinian families of the dead from the 1982 Falklands War to access the islands where their loved ones are buried.
Before Covid, Cordoba was chosen as the airport in Argentina – because it was felt too politically sensitive to have direct flights from the capital, Buenos Aires.
The new Argentinian president, Javier Milei, will have given his approval to resume the flights.
The latitude of the Falklands, is 51.7 south – the same distance from a pole as Essex, which is 51.7 north. But the climate is less appealing, with an average of 9C even in the peak summer months of January and February.
