The north side of the city were you could always see airplanes landing
If you listen carefully you can still hear the planes flying thousands of meters above the city. Its a soft distant roar that doesn't compare to what we heard all of our lives.
During almost 26 years I lived in this city, a city where it was normal to hear planes landing right in the middle of the city. Named after the Venezuelan-born independence hero Antonio Jose de Sucre, the Aeropuerto Mariscal Sucre began its operations in 1960. It was one of the highest airports in the world (at 2,800 meters), and it was located in the northern part of the city, 10 minutes away from Quito's financial center, but most importantly for me, less than 5 minutes away from my house.
A satellite picture from google maps showing the Old Mariscal Sucre Airport right in the middle of the city
Landing in Quito was a wonderful spectacle; If it was a clear summer day you saw the whole city expanding beneath you and surrounded by mountains. If the plane came from the south side of the city you could catch a glimpse of the city center and the Virgen del Panecillo. Sometimes, when the city was covered with fog if you were lucky enough to land the city would appear magically out of a sea of whiteness, however, when there was too much fog it was most likely that your flight would not land in Quito and they would send you to Guayaquil to spend the night. Landing on a clear night instead was a show of lights. The city glimmers like gold jewels at night.
The issue is that an international airport in the middle of a city, especially a city at high altitude which is surrounded by mountains, poses a lot of problems. The airport has a history of at least 6 serious accidents and several minor incidents. Some planes have crashed into buildings, others seemed not to have enough space to land and slipped off the runway. Apart from that, the increasing air traffic needed a larger airport for larger planes, but because it was in the middle of the city it was virtually impossible to expand the airport. For all of these reasons a couple of days ago, on February 19, Iberia operated the final flight coming out of the Old Mariscal Sucre Airport, and the next day all operations began in the New Mariscal Sucre Airport, approximately an hour away from the city, at least two hours away if you count the traffic.
I found this picture using Google Images. You could always find people standing out of the airport watching planes land and leave.
Another Google Images picture, the airplane in the city
Now Quito is a quieter city. I am sure some people are happy, especially the people who live right next to the airport, the people who live near the Gonzales Suarez area, and especially the teachers and students in the Alianza Francesa who had to stop lessons every time a plane landed because the noise made it impossible to hear anyone speaking. On the other hand, there are many of us who miss the sound of the airplanes landing, to me it was the sound of Quito. The city seems a bit empty, as if the music had been turned off.
I will always remember the sight of airplanes landing in the city, the sight of a plane passing directly above me at a close distance, the smell of the city when you landed in the afternoons, the city glimmering like starlight right below you at night and my grandmother who loved standing by my window whenever she came to visit us when we were young. She always stood there, fascinated, watching the planes fly in and fly out.
And finally a quieter city, where you can no longer see planes coming in the horizon
