There are airports that seem designed to remind us how complex flying is. It also depends on the exact place where you are trying to land. In Madeirathat reality is understood very quickly: Cristiano Ronaldo airport It coexists with the Atlantic, with difficult terrain and with winds capable of altering operations. The novelty is not that it is a demanding airport, something well known, but that Portugal has put figures to a problem that seems to have worsened.
The data. He put the information on the table Hugo Espírito SantoSecretary of State for Infrastructure of Portugal, during a parliamentary hearing held at the end of May. According to DNOTICIAS.PTweather records show an “abnormal variation” in wind speed starting in 2015 at Madeira airport. The average climb is around three knots, approximately 5.5 km/h, a figure that may seem small from the outside, but which in an infrastructure so sensitive to the wind has very concrete operational consequences. In the words of the president himself, this increase “makes a large part of the operations unviable.”
An airport conditioned by its geography. To understand why three knots matters so much, you have to look at where the runway is. Euronews describes the airport as one of the most demanding in the world due to an unpleasant combination: one end built on concrete pillars, terrain that rises quickly in the vicinity, cliffs near the other end and winds generated by the nearby mountains. This mix can translate into local turbulence, waiting in the air, detours or cancellations when the weather is not good.
Looking for an explanation. After recognizing the average increase of three knots, Espírito Santo explained that the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere and the National Civil Engineering Laboratory are analyzing the phenomenon to determine its causes. That caution is relevant: we know that the records show an abnormal variation in wind speed, but not why. In an airport so exposed to local conditions, this difference between confirming the problem and explaining its origin is key to not taking for granted what is still being investigated.
New system. The MAWINDS system combines LIDAR and X-band radar to analyze weather conditions in almost real time around Cristiano Ronaldo Airport. The project was presented by the Portuguese Government in December 2024 with an investment of 3.5 million euros assumed by NAV Portugal, although its technical incorporation was not yet fully closed in May 2026. Its purpose is to better detect episodes of turbulence and adverse wind before they affect the operation.
Technology still in development. Everything seems to indicate that installing such a system is not equivalent to fully incorporating it into operations from one day to the next. The Portuguese infrastructure manager acknowledged that there were still no preliminary reports on MAD Winds and attributed the delay in its certification to the complexity of an unusual technology. As he explained, before being installed in Madeira this technology had only been deployed in four airports. That is to say, the airport already has a more advanced tool for observing the wind, but its full use still depends on technical work that cannot be simply accelerated.
The roadmap. When MAWINDS was presented in December 2024, it was explained that a one-year pre-operation phase was opening to generate data and give ANAC the necessary information before considering, in the future, a possible revision of the wind operating limits. The system is not only designed to better look at the weather, but to build a sufficiently solid database to allow regulatory decisions to be made without lowering the priority of safety.
Images | Madeira Airports
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