Bird strikes have emerged as a top concern for aviation players in Kenya even as officials drag their feet on moving dumpsites.
Airline
operators say bird strikes occur every year, putting the lives of
passengers at risk and subjecting companies to huge losses.
The
latest case of bird strike occurred on Friday last week involving a
Jambojet plane and damaged its engine resulting to cancellation of
services on Mombasa-Nairobi route.
In mid-October, a
Turkish Airlines jet heading to Istanbul with 121 passengers and six
crew members was forced to make an emergency landing in Mombasa’s Moi
International Airport after a bird strike.
“We had to
delay and cancel flights due to the Friday bird strike,” said Jambojet
chief executive Willem Hondius. “It is usually a very unpleasant
experience for the passengers involved and bad for our reputation.”
Mr
Hondius said the airline experiences bird strikes three to four times a
year and the recent incident was a second case for the same plane in
four years.
He describes bird strike as a costly affair
that leads to unforeseen expenses such as renting additional capacity
to transport the stranded passengers.
“It can happen
anywhere, but the chance of a bird strike goes up when there is a
dumpsite close to the airport or fishermen’s activities at lakeside
cities like Kisumu,” he said.
The Kenya Civil Aviation
Authority (KCAA) director general Gilbert Kibe acknowledged that bird
strikes were a major concern to aviation players.
“But they are generally a major concern around airports that have dumpsites nearby,” Mr Kibe said in an interview on Tuesday.
Mr
Kibe said the agency will not approve new dumpsites near the airports.
This has been a bone of contention for years between the KCAA and the
county governments.
Confusion is reigning over plans to
move the Dandora dumpsite to Ruai as the KCAA and Nairobi County have
been issuing conflicting statements several years after the plan was
mooted.
Nairobi County officials last year maintained
they were forging ahead with the plan even as the KCAA said the agency
had convinced City Hall not to relocate the dumpsite to Ruai, a Jomo
Kenyatta International Airport flight path.
Last
year, the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) rolled out a programme aimed
at monitoring the population and movements of birds inhabiting dumpsites
around JKIA, especially on flight paths.
In Kisumu,
Anyang’ Nyong’o, the governor, has launched a Sh98 million plan to move
the Kachok dumpsite that has also been cited as posing health risk to
residents.
According to KAA’s Wildlife Control
Department, about 20 dumpsites have been identified as sitting on flight
paths and have been monitored consistently for a period of two years.
Statistics
show that a rapid rise in the number of scavenger birds are an
indicator of poor waste management and worsening sanitary condition
around the dumpsite.
The study by KAA also revealed a
big jump in the population of the five species of birds in the dumpsite
which pose the biggest threat to aircraft safety.
These included the Marabou stork, the cattle egret, the pied crow, the sacred ibis and the black kite.
“These
species of birds are deemed dangerous because of the two common
attributes- they are large birds and they tend to form large colonies,”
said the KAA.
A flying bird from a dumpsite near an
airport usually crisscrosses the aircraft flight paths at same heights
as the moving planes thus causing strike incidents.
The
process of monitoring dumpsites and birds being conducted by KAA also
involves identifying and recording all dumpsites in the vicinity of the
airport, documenting and tracking growth in the population of birds and
monitoring their movements and activities.
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