Carolina Mendes

Carolina has written about Brazilian urban transit and aviation for twelve years, most recently as an independent journalist after a long staff tenure at a Brazilian transit publication. She grew up around aviation: her father, brother, and uncle are all current commercial pilots at three different Brazilian carriers, which she says taught her early how to listen to flight stories without taking any one carrier’s side.

She writes for airport.flights as a paid freelance contributor, one piece a month focused on Latin American airports, the messy and ambitious airport-to-city transit infrastructure projects that define daily traveller experience in the region, and the gap between the marketing of an airport’s accessibility and the actual bus schedule on a rainy Thursday at six in the morning. Her beat is the urban transit interface that most aviation writers treat as a footnote.

She lives in Vila Madalena, flies GRU as her default, and maintains that the express bus to GRU from Tatuapé is the unromantic, correct answer for most travellers — not the slick airport-rail link the marketing campaigns prefer.