(Posted 17th April 2023)
Those in the former government of Uhuru Kenyatta, who were responsible for not letting the construction of East Africa’s main international airport continue a few years ago, once again have egg all over the faces and their already sullied reputation shredded some more.
This morning did a Singapore Airlines cargo B747F abandon take off due to a technical problem and subsequently got stuck on the runway, preventing regular jet aircraft from landing and taking off.
This, as often happened in the past, led to the closure of the airport and a very costly diversion of flights into other Kenyan and regional airports.
The airport issued some information as shown above to alert in particular passengers heading to JKIA for their flights, which will now be delayed for most of the day.
It is understood that the aircraft has now been removed from the runway and landings and take offs of commercial jetliners have resumed.
The situation led to immediate calls from the aviation fraternity to give maximum effort towards the construction of the second runway, but even once the political decision has been taken will it be years before it can become operational, a sign of a massive political failure of the past regime which for shortsighted reasons has relegated JKIA’s operational capacity into the lower leage of regional airports.
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A regular source and contributor from the aviation sector in Kenya had this to say to ATCNews: ‘I can’t even remember how often this happened to us here at JKIA over the past years but every time it is very very costly due to aircraft diversions and missed connections. And every time are our politicians called to account why they have not agreed to build a second runway. The terminal rehabilitation is the only positive thing we have seen about JKIA in recent years but we lack a second runway as today’s incident showed. Our politicians need to wake up and act to keep JKIA as the regional number 1 airport or else we will remain a second class aviation facility. And by the way, the newly appointed board of KAA consists largely of people completely ignorant to the industry, what a joke that is!’
