A MAJOR AIR SHOW in Sao Paulo this week turned the spotlight on the robust health of Brazil’s general aviation market, which is thriving despite the global economic slowdown.
General aviation, which makes up the majority of the world’s air traffic, refers to all flights other than military and scheduled airline passenger and cargo flights.
The category, made up mostly of small planes, covers corporate travel, private flying, flight training, air ambulance, police aviation, aerial firefighting, air charter, and bush flying.
At Sao Paulo’s Congonhas airport, 70 planes were on display as part of the ninth edition of the Latin American Business Aviation Conference & Exhibition (LABACE), which organizers say is the second largest general aviation show in the world after the Oshkosh air show in the US state of Wisconsin.
“The general aviation market has expanded considerably in Brazil unlike in other countries,” said Eduardo Marson, president of the Brazilian Civil Aviation Association (ABAG).
The sector soared 6.4 percent from 2010 to 2011 and should grow 4.5 to 5 percent from 2011 to 2012, he added. “But we are not immune from the world (economic) crisis,” he said.
The three-day air show, which closed Friday, drew around 100 manufacturers including Canada’s Bombardier, Gulfstream and Hawker Beechcraft from the United States, Europe’s Airbus, and Brazil’s Embraer, as well as airplane service, insurance and maintenance providers.
Last year, the show featured 60 aircraft, drew 15,000 visitors over three days, and closed with contracts worth a total of $400 million.
There is growth in all general aviation categories in Brazil, “but especially business aviation,” said Dorieldo Luis dos Prazeres, an air control expert at the Brazilian Civil Aviation Agency.
“The economy is booming, the companies, the number of rich people and this means higher sales of aircraft,” dos Prazeres said.
Brazil, the world’s sixth largest economy and home to 191 million people, is a promising market for airplane manufacturers even though the government has revised downward its GDP forecast for this year to under three percent.
Commercial aviation regularly serves 130 destinations across this country that is larger than the continental United States, while general aviation serves 3,500, or 75 percent of the national territory, according to ABAG.
“For our business aircraft division, Brazil is a very promising market where our client base is growing,” said Annie Cossette, a spokeswoman for Bombardier.
Leading domestic plane maker Embraer had several models on display at the show, including the $4 million Phenom 100, which sits six to 8 passengers, and the $53 million, 19-seat Lineage 1000, which looks like a small jet airliner.
Embraer, the world’s third largest commercial plane manufacturer, delivered its first business plane in 2002 and has sold 540 to date, including 112 in Brazil. More than half of the company’s sales have taken place over the past two years.
Embraer is also seeking to increase its general aviation sales in the United States, Europe and China.
“We are newcomers in this sector but business is good,” said Embraer spokesman Marco Tulio Pellegrini. “These aircraft are no longer viewed as luxury in Brazil but as a tool which makes it possible to generate more business in less time.”
The growth of business aviation is closely linked to Brazil’s economic activity, he said, noting that the country will host the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Brazil boasts the world’s second largest general aviation fleet behind the United States: as of 2011 it had 13,094 planes, according to ABAG figures. Of those, 25 percent are based in the economic powerhouse state of Sao Paulo.
The country has 1,650 corporate jets, used by those who can afford to escape the urban traffic chaos.
Air show spotlights Brazil’s booming general aviation sector
Air show spotlights Brazil’s booming general aviation sector
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
