About Sanya
Sanya is a city on the island of Hainan. With its tropical climate, beach and many hotels, it's considered to be the Hawaii of China.
Sanya has a civilian airport ("Sanya-Phoenix"), but also a small naval airbase (Sanya-Yaxian). Based aircraft are 3 Y-7's (An-24's), Z-8's (Super Frelons), Z-9's (Dauphins) and some Y-12's.
The base
The base can be found on Google Earth. As you can see, one end of the runway is located right next to the boulevard and the beach is nearby.
The action
During the first couple of days I didn't see any activity at the base. Three Y-7's were sleeping on a small platform wearing covers and four Super Frelons could be seen as well, but weren't moving either.
One day my girlfriend decided that we should get up early to get the best breakfast in our hotel and then I saw helicopters making approaches. With only one weekday to go I suddenly realized that the base was only active in the morning...
So, the next day we got up early again and went for a walk on the beach. There are lots of tourists walking on the beach, also carrying camera's so nobody really cares if you take pictures of the landing aircraft. In fact, during this morning people from the navy had set up some sort of mobile antenna on the beach and I was standing next to them while taking pictures.
Stupid enough, I hadn't brought all of my camera gear, so I only had a 70-200 with a 1.4TC to take pictures. Also, during the morning the sky was mostly clouded which didn't help either...
Helicopters operations ended around 10:00AM and the mobile antenna was broken down. We thought action would be over so we started walking back to the hotel via the beach. Twenty minutes later we were still walking and I noticed an Y-7 approaching over the sea. This shot was taken from some distance with serious backlight.
A couple of minutes later, a second Y-7 came back. On these shots you can see how the fixed wing aircraft approach this airbase.
Like I said earlier, there were no flying activities in the afternoons. It looks like flying starts early in the morning each day and the fun stops around 10:30AM. The only exception to this was on Friday afternoon when an Y-12 came in (no pic though). A couple of these are based at Sanya as well, but I have the impression that these are civilian government aircraft and do not carry military markings.
Hope you liked the story and the pictures.
Log can be found here: http://forum.scramble.nl/viewtopic.php?t=70331
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