The flight reservation system in Nasca:

 With this information below and the list of permissions, which the tower of the airport makes each year, you get a better idea of which agencies are better to avoid and with which agencies you have the best change to fly on the day you prefer. How this works?

Let me explain: In Nasca there are 11 agencies which have to share only one airstrip. These agencies are scheduled to fly each day more or less between 7:00h and 17:00h, but the other tricky part is the weather. It is not always clear enough to start flying this early. Especially from May till August (yes, high season…), it often happens that they can´t start flying before 10:00 am, however they still try to sell the same amount of ticket´s or even more. You can imagine how much chaos this gives… Especially because no-one tells you/us how there reservation system works. They all tell you that if the weather is good you can start flying at 7:00h and if it is bad, you have to wait until the weather gets better, reservation or not. What they forget to mention is that there exists a list that determines for each day of the year which agency is aloud to fly the first round of the day. This agency is the only one which is aloud to fly at 7:00h if the weather allows. The agency which is last in line has to wait a minimum of 2 hours (max. 2.45h) before it has its first turn that day. Imagine what happens if the weather is bad and your agency is the last in line. If the first round starts to fly at 10:00h, the agency which is last in line will not be able to fly its first turn before noon…Something else that´s important to know is that there exist 11 agencies, which have together about 34 airplanes. Some of them have 7 planes and others no more than one or two airplanes. From the moment the weather is good enough to fly, each 5 minutes one plane is allowed to start its tour of about 25 min. flying above the Nasca Lines.

Knowing that there are 5min. between each turn, it is logical to know also that an agency which only has one plane always has to wait 33 flight turns of 5 min. (2.45h) in-between its first and its second flight. With this information you also know that the bigger agencies, which have more planes, like AeroParacas and Air Condor (now Travel Air) who have 7 planes, can fly far more people around the same time. AeroParacas for example has to wait only 34 planes – 7 = 27 planes x 5 min. = 2.15h between the time its last airplane flew and its first airplane is aloud to fly again. The first agency has only one plane with 3 seats, so can max. only fly 3 people each 2.45h. AeroParacas has 7 planes, some with 3, but most with 5 seats, so can fly around 30 people each 2.15h, starting from the moment the weather is clear and it´s their turn of the day…

The only things you now need to know is which agencies have the most airplanes, what is their turn on the day you want to fly and from what moment the weather is clear enough to start flying.

 The weather is unpredictable, the permission-list is at the tower, but a copy of the list for 2008 is below and in my photo-album under Peru-Nasca and this is what I know about the agencies, starting with the biggest: 1- Aero Condor (Travel Air) 7 planes, 2- AeroParacas 7 planes, 3-Aeropalcazu 4 planes, 4-Alas Peruanas 4 planes, 5- Aero Ica 3 planes, 6- Aero Santos 2 planes, 7- Aero Moche 2 plane, 8- Alas de America 2 planes, 9 and 10 CDP SPZA and CDP SPLH (Aero Condor and an other agency from Ica, which both leave with planes of 12 passengers from the airport of Ica), 11- the poor Tae with only one plane of 3 seats… 

Something else that´s handy to know is that the Tower decides each day each moment if a plane yes is allowed to fly or that there might be something wrong and the call the flight off. Before the Tower makes a decision about this it wants to see a passenger list from each plane that´s scheduled to leave. This list contains the name, passport nr., age and estimate weight of its passengers. During high season there is about a two hour delay in filling in this list and a granted permission to fly at a specific hour. Together with your request around what time you want to fly (have a look at the time(turn) schedule first), try to fill in this list a.s.a.p., or they will give the seat to someone else. 

Of course, even with all the info above it will still be impossible to determine an exact hour to fly, because some planes can be out off service, or maybe a plane doesn´t want to start, and in these situations these planes lose their turns and everything moves 5 min.Still, with this list I want to inform you better how the system in Nasca is suppose to work, to avoid misunderstandings and to avoid that you fall for agencies which lie about how big they are, how many turns they can fly and at which hours. Unfortunately this happens a lot and this causes unnecessary long waiting times at the airport, which is not only bad for us, but also for the restaurants and other shops in Nasca. I heard they already lost quite some money because of these ridicules waiting times. I hope this info can help us and them a bit. 

 A bigger copy of this list you can find in my photo album under Peru and Nasca.

It is now 12 October 2008 and I have to admit that things finally calmed down around Nasca.

Finally now the agencies show some respect for the tourists again. Reservations are respected, you don´t have to wait very long before you can fly and you can even find tickets for 50 US$ again (all right, you now do still have to pay 20 Soles (around 7 US$) airport tax.). The reason that the service finally gets better again is simply because there are now less tourists, not because the agencies bow for the tourists... Altough I did hear that after all the bad service of the past months, the government now is going to put some-one on the airport in charge with watching over the service of the travelagencies. Hopefully part of the reason for this was my complaining on televicion ;-) And hopefully next year there will be less problems. In any case, I will try to get this flight list again, for when things start to go crazy again...