Article - Major Justino Marino Cuesta Air Base visit - Madrid Colombia – October 2018

Major Justino Marino Cuesta Air Base visit - Madrid Colombia

On the 4th April 2018, Aviation Reporting along with the Aviation Press were invited to a photo shoot as guests of the Fuerza Aerea Colombiana (FAC) at Major Marino Cuesta Air Base in the town of Madrid near Bogota Colombia.

The FAC has it's central maintenance depot located here and it is known as the Comando Aereo de Mantenimiento (CAMAN), which performs depot level heavy maintenance work on the Cessna 208, Casa 212, Bell UH-1H, Lockheed C-130 and IAI Arava . There are many upgrade programs being worked upon here as well, these include the CIAC T-90, Embraer T-27, UAV/Drone design and converting the Bell UH-1H to the UH-1H-II variant. As well as CAMAN the base is host to the CASA 212-300's of Escuadron de Transporte 911, an FAC transport squadron assigned to the Grupo de Transporte Aereo 91.

For our group tour around the base, we were first given a short power point presentation on CAMAN and the history of Major Marino Cuesta Air Base, then escorted around the hangers and joining ramps. Each hanger had different aircraft being worked on, Firstly the Cessna 208 then C-130's, these were in two different hangers, then came the Casa 212, followed by the UAV/Drone and composite design hanger (very interesting talk on the types here), then the UH-1H upgrade/conversation hanger which was spotless and had each stage of the upgrade documented on description boards, in total 5 Huey's were present here. The final hanger to be visited was filled with all types of aircraft, T-27's, T-90's, Casa 212 and an IAI Arava, the Arava seemed to be everyone's favourite aircraft from the visit, all left this hanger with a smile on their faces.

The final stop for the tour, after a quick comfort break with coffee and biscuits was the base dump, this was located at the far side of the runway and was just a stone's throw away across the runway, but our transport bus was not allowed to cross, so we had to take the dirt track to the dump, although only just over one a km away this seemed to take forever down this dirt track and to make things worse it started to rain heavy. When we arrived many departed the bus in heavy rain to photograph the rare types, i did not, but everything could be seen which included many UH-1's, C45, C-47's and a consolidated OA-10A. All were happy we had come here and it was just a shame it was raining, but that's nothing new for Colombia, sunshine one minute, raining the next and then another hour later it's blue sky. Now we had arrived back near the main gate and was time to say goodbye to our FAC hosts, smiles and handshakes all round to our guides, nothing had been too much trouble for them and each hanger we visited had a guide to explain what maintenance or upgrade program was happening here. A big thumbs up to everyone involved in making this visit go so smoothly, we look forward to visiting again in the near future.

Aviation Reporting would like thank the FAC HQ Command, Major Barrero of the FAC press office, Captain Javier and 2nd Lt Hernandez for being our tour guides around the base and Poalo Di Biagio of JP4 magazine for organising the visit.

Author Mark Forest

Photography by Mark Forest and Stewart Toone