In Photos dot Org

A Jet2 737 comes in low over the beach at Playa Honda, undercarriage down, engines glowing pink in the dying light. The approach-lighting pier marches out from the lava coast like an unfinished bridge, each platform waiting to flash its sequence and guide the next arrival onto runway 03 at Arrecife. I took this in January 2020, a few short weeks before the word “Covid” started elbowing its way into every conversation and the holiday traffic into Lanzarote dried up almost overnight.

Looking at it now feels a bit like looking at a photo of someone the day before they got bad news: everything still in its right place, sun setting beautifully, plane on schedule, no idea what’s about to happen. The 737 didn’t know either.

The structure on the right is the approach-lighting pier for runway 03 at Lanzarote Airport (ACE). It has to extend several hundred metres out over the sea because the runway threshold sits right at the coastline, leaving no land on which to mount the standard ICAO approach light array. It’s one of a small handful of airports in Europe where the approach lights are essentially built into the ocean; Madeira and Gibraltar have similarly creative solutions to the same “we ran out of land” problem.

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