I spent a couple of hours waiting for a connection flight to Thessaloniki. Tried to do some Geocaching but there is nothing really close so I used my time creating a couple of waymarks. Info about the airport:
Brussels South Charleroi Airport (BSCA), also called Charleroi Airport, (IATA: CRL, ICAO: EBCI) is located in Charleroi precisely in Gosselies, 46 kilometres (29 mi) south of central Brussels, in Wallonia (Belgium).
A new terminal opened in January 2008. It has a capacity of up to 5 million passengers a year, which means that it has reached it maximum capacity in 2010 (5 195 372 passengers). It has been awarded in 2011 as the second best low-cost airport by Skytrax.com after London Stansted Airport.[1]
The Airport is also home of some important Flight Schools like Belgian Flight School which offers complete pilot training and Brussels Aviation School offering Private Pilot and Night Flight Qualification training using Ciglos Aviation Training Methodology as well as other qualifications in partnership with BFS.
The Aéropole, one of the Science Parks of Wallonia, is located near the airport.
The first aeronautical activities in Gosselies date back to 1919 as a flying school, then aeronautical maintenance activities the following year. The British aircraft manufacturer Fairey Aviation settled a subsidiary Avions Fairey on the site (then known as Mont des Bergers) in 1931.
Gosselies airfield became a public aerodrome after World War II, but the main activities of the site remained aeronautical constructions (installation of SABCA in 1954, then SONACA in 1978, taking the place of Fairey).
In the 1970s, the Belgian national airline Sabena launched a Liège-Charleroi-London service, but this was soon dropped because of poor results. Gosselies was left with almost no passenger traffic, the airport being mainly used for private or pleasure flights, training flights and occasional charters to leisure destinations around the Mediterranean Sea or to Algeria.
Operations at Charleroi Airport grew in the 1990s, with a new commercial management structure (BSCA - Brussels South Charleroi Airport) and the arrival of Irish low cost airline Ryanair in 1997, which opened its first continental base at Charleroi a few years later.
Although criticised for the subsidies paid by the Walloon government to help its installation, Ryanair opened new routes from Charleroi (they also closed two destinations : London-Stansted and Liverpool, although Stansted was re-introduced in June 2007 before being suspended again). Other low-cost carriers later joined Ryanair in Charleroi, such as Wizz Air and Air Service Plus (later replaced by On Air). The Polish airline Air Polonia operated services from Charleroi to Warsaw and Katowice before going bankrupt in August 2004.
In September 2006 it was announced that Moroccan low-cost airline Jet4you would launch three weekly flights to Casablanca (on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday) starting 1 November 2006, in code share cooperation with Belgian airline Jetairfly.
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