Gavà Mar
Why aircraft fly over Gavà Mar
The route is not chosen at random: the wind chooses it. The airport has two runway configurations, and Gavà Mar experiences something very different depending on which one is in use.
Why are there thirty passes some days and a thousand on others?
Because the airport switches configuration according to the wind, and that switch is not a nuance: it turns the map around. In one configuration aircraft take off and land on one side; in the other, on the opposite one. A zone that lies under one of the two does not see its exposure vary slightly around an average: it sees it jump between two regimes.
That is why you will never find a “daily average” here. A thirty-pass day and a thousand-pass day are not a quiet day and a bad day: they are two different configurations, and averaging them describes a day nobody has lived through.
Which configuration brings the aircraft here?
By day, between 07:00 and 23:00, the preferred one is the west configuration: arrivals on 24R and departures on the 24s. The non-preferred one is east, with arrivals on 06L and departures on the 06s. Which of the two flies over Gavà Mar is not something you have to take on trust: on the zone panel every pass carries its heading and its altitude, and the two configurations separate on their own.
Switching between them is nobody’s whim. Aircraft take off and land into the wind, so when the wind turns, the whole airport turns with it. That is why a zone’s exposure depends on the weather rather than on anything happening on the ground.
And at night?
Between 23:00 and 07:00 the table is a different one. The preferred configuration becomes north —arrivals on 02 and departures on 06R— and the non-preferred one is west with a single runway, landing and departing on 24L.
It is the band that is felt most and looked at least. A departure on the 24 axis at three in the morning is not the same as at three in the afternoon: by day that is the preferred movement, and by night it is the one the rule keeps for when the preferred configuration cannot be held.
When is an hour left with no published cause?
Because the rule states when the preferred configuration may stop being held, and it states it in numbers: wind components —gusts included— of 10 knots tailwind or 20 knots crosswind require the change, and from 7 knots tailwind it may be considered. A number can be checked: for each hour, that hour’s weather report is taken and compared.
When none of those thresholds was crossed, the hour is left with no published cause. That does not say the decision was arbitrary, and it will not be said here: the rule carries one further clause, with no threshold at all, capable of covering any hour. What it does say is that the hour rests entirely on the one clause that cannot be checked from outside. Asking which one applied is legitimate.
What can I do with this?
Look at your own zone. The Gavà Mar panel shows what happened today hour by hour, and the pattern of recent weeks shows which configuration the airport was in each day. That is enough to see at a glance whether a bad night was an exception or the regime of that week.
And if a particular episode meets the conditions, the site prepares your complaint draft: date, time, zone, aircraft model and lowest measured altitude, plus the wind paragraph when that hour’s conditions support it. You file it, and it goes in your name.