A Kenya Airways plane on the tarmac at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. FILE PHOTO | DIANA NGILA |
NATION MEDIA GROUP
NEW YORK
A Kenya Airways jet nearly collided midair two years ago with a private plane carrying Djibouti's president, the Washington Postreported on Thursday.
The
newspaper includes no details on that May 2013 incident in a story
revealing dangerous conditions in the skies above Djibouti.
The
small country's main airport handles thousands of commercial flights
per year and an even larger number of takeoffs and landings of US
military aircraft based at an adjoining installation leased by the
Pentagon.
"Conditions at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti,
the base for US pilots flying sensitive missions over Yemen and Somalia,
have become so dire that American warplanes and civilian airliners
alike are routinely placed in jeopardy," the Post reported.
US Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to visit Camp Lemonnier next week after a two-day visit to Kenya.
RISK OF CATASTROPHE
Citing official documents obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act, the Post
story indicates that the risks of aviation catastrophe are due
primarily to the "hazardous habits" of Djiboutian air-traffic
controllers.
"Some controllers habitually dozed on the
floor while on duty, pulling a blanket over their heads to drown out
radio traffic," the Post reported.
"Others
immersed themselves in video games and personal phone calls while
ignoring communication from pilots. Still others punished US flight
crews for a perceived lack of respect by forcing them to circle overhead
until they ran low on fuel."
The civilians responsible
for overseeing an average of nearly 100 takeoffs and landings per day —
more than half involving US military planes — commonly chewed miraa in
the flight tower, the Post said.
Over a
three-month period, Djiboutian controllers committed errors involving
aircraft operations at a rate 1700 times greater than the rate in the
United States, the Post noted.
"Outsiders who
tried to impose order did so at their peril," the report continued. "One
Djiboutian supervisor was beaten up by a controller and tossed down the
flight-tower stairs. A US Navy officer was threatened with a pipe."
STOPPED ATTENDING CLASSES
A
$7 million (Sh662 million) US programme intended to improve safety at
the airport ended in failure, the official documents are said to show.
Djiboutian personnel stopped attending classes conducted by former US
aviation officials and locked their trainers out of the flight tower,
the Post reported.
The Djiboutian air-traffic
controllers were said to be deeply resentful of the drones that fly
regular surveillance missions over the Horn of Africa. The pilotless
aircraft have also reportedly carried out strikes on targets in Somalia
and Yemen.
According to former US government aviation officials whom the Post
does not name, the Djiboutian controllers viewed the drones as
unreliable and "malign weapons for killing Muslims," the newspaper said.
The Djiboutians often issued edicts forbidding drones from operating at the airport, the Post
added. "Tensions over the drones became so severe that the US military
agreed to move the robotic aircraft in 2013 from Camp Lemonnier to a
remote desert airstrip in another part of the country," reporter Craig
Whitlock wrote.
A Djiboutian diplomat rejected the
report of air-traffic controllers sleeping on the job, chewing miraa and
leaving the tower unattended.
"That's nonsense," Issa Saher Bouraleh, a counselor at the Djiboutian Embassy in Washington, said in an interview with the Post.
“I’m sure that the airport is safe. It is more safe than other Arab countries.”
If
controllers were sleeping on the tower floor or hooked on miraa, Mr
Bouraleh told the newspaper, “there would be accidents every day
No comments :
Post a Comment