“Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts…”

17th July 2011

By Anthony Peacock

You have to feel slightly concerned about any airline whose motto is ‘the Atlantic and you’.

If the airline in question flies across the Atlantic on a regular basis, you’d hope that they might instead subscribe to the principle of keeping the Atlantic and their passengers safely separated.

But no: this is the interesting alternative hook with which Sata – the official airline of the Azores – uses to entice passengers onto their aeroplanes. At least the Azores doesn’t boast a car factory: ‘the windscreen and you’ probably wouldn’t sell many vehicles as a catchphrase.

The Azores in fact has a history of aeronautical incidents. Lajes airbase in the Azores was the scene of an unpowered landing by a Canadian jet in 2001, after a pilot reacted brilliantly to a fuel leak on a flight from Toronto by transferring all the remaining fuel to the tank with the hole in it. Unsurprisingly, the Airbus A330 ran out halfway across the Atlantic, but at least the captain then redeemed himself by landing successfully.

What made it even more impressive was the fact that most of the airports on the Azores have very short runways with little room for manoeuvre, and every possibility of interfacing with the ocean once more if you overshoot.

Despite that, for one day, Ponta Delgada – home of the Sata Rallye Acores, won by Juho Hanninen over the weekend – was among the busiest airports in the world. That day was September 11, 2001, when in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, American and European airspace suddenly shut down. Problem was, there were still a load of planes in the middle of the Atlantic with no place to go. So they descended on the island of Sao Miguel like a swarm of dispossessed locusts: there is a photograph of all the parked planes lined up wingtip to wingtip at the airport, a bit like a long-term car park.

Sata’s unconventional view of marketing is probably what has led them to sponsor their home rally, as strangely enough most airlines now tend to shy away from associating themselves with a sport where crashes are an everyday occurrence. Air France were close to a deal with Peugeot a number of years ago, before backing out of it when they realised that scrap metal with bits of ‘Air France’ written on it wasn’t going to be good for business. It would probably be less of an issue now, as people are getting used to it.

Back in the day though, the airlines had no such qualms. Finnair regularly sponsored the flying Finns (appropriately enough) and who can forget the Alitalia-liveried Fiats and Lancias? In modern times by contrast, airline patronage of motorsport has become about as politically correct as red Marlboro.

 So let’s hear it for Sata. They may be keen to take you swimming, and they may also serve up strange little baguettes containing so much sticky melted cheese that eating one is the equivalent of stomach stapling, but at least they’ve got fever. And what could be more important than that?