JUBA’S INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT DUE FOR WEEKEND CLOSURE WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT
(Posted 21st August 2015)
Air traffic on weekends in and out of South Sudan’s capital city of Juba will effective tomorrow come to a crashing halt, as the international airport is going to be closed, ostensibly for ‘repairs’ according to official reasons given to airlines. Night operations are not possible at present and have not been for decades due to the airport having few navigational aids and no runway lights, so the effective time given in the announcement of 00.00 hrs Saturday to 24.00 hrs Sunday is a fluke anyway of the highest order.
In real terms does this mean that there will be no aircraft movements permitted during daylight on Saturday and Sunday until at least April next year relegating South Sudan to the aviation ice age and exposing the soft underbelly of a country at war with itself for the past 20 months.
In comparison is the busy Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi only shutting down operations from midnight to six a.m. every night for runway resealing, something clearly impossible in South Sudan, leaving airlines and travelers in a lurch.
Notices by Juba based embassies are specific that not even urgent medical evacuation flights will be permitted, condemning patients who need evacuation to for instance Nairobi or Johannesburg to agony if not death in the absence of such treatment options. The same applies for individuals who need to leave the country for reasons of their own, for instance when their visitors passes expire and with already two attacks on the road from Juba to the Ugandan border in Nimule has road transport also become hazardous at best.
Tourism, once a fast growing industry in South Sudan, has come to a complete standstill, leaving the often extraordinarily large herds of plains game to poaching gangs as there is no more income from wildlife based tourism and no funds to pay game rangers. The value of the local currency has all but crashed in the absence of significant foreign exchange earnings as oil production and exports too have significantly reduced as a result of shifting battle fronts. To make it worse has the lack of hard currency threatened the economic survival of two water purification plants where drinking water is bottled and the new brewery which SAB had established two years ago is about to close too for lack of imported raw materials.
Watch this space for breaking and regular aviation news from Eastern Africa.
One Response
There was a brand new runway light system installed at JIA in 2011. It fell into disrepair only a few months after being handed over to the airport. The edge lights work but approach and PAPI systems broken.
there is a brand new Thales VOR/DME donated by Turkey (replacing the earlier broken system). It was installed in Feb 2014, but was never brought online due to lack of power (original solar panels and batteries long gone). The airport should perhaps outsource aerodrome engineering to a competent partner.