The Russian-speaking pilots sat coolly behind locked cockpit doors, unaware of the failed air conditioning in the passenger-packed cabin of their geriatric aircraft as it sat on a sun-baked African runway.
Weasua Air Transport, the Liberian operator of that jet-prop aircraft, was among 92 airlines banned on Wednesday from European airspace due to safety concerns. Most of the blacklisted operators are based in Africa, where planes are six times likelier to crash than elsewhere and travellers swap tales of crises averted.
While many of Africa’s airlines meet international standards, many more don’t.
In announcing the ban on virtually all aircraft overseen by civil aviation authorities in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Swaziland from landing at European airports, European Union Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot labelled many of the planes ”flying coffins”.
Wednesday’s ban, and earlier similar orders, rankle with many Africans. They point out that most of the banned airlines — like Thom’s Airways from Congo — no longer operate and never fly to Europe anyway, while Africans have little choice but to use them to hop around the world’s poorest continent.
The deputy director of the civil aviation in Sierra Leone, which had 13 airlines banned, said his country hadn’t had a safety audit by the main aviation-industry oversight group since the end of the country’s brutal 1989-2002 civil war.
Still, ”every state has sovereignty over its airspace”, said Badara Allieu Tarrawallie.
The woes befalling Africa’s sovereign states are the same stymieing its aviation industry: poverty, conflict and poor governance. With little government oversight, airlines let their standards slip, safety audits go undone and small problems are left unattended.
A continent-wide trend of economic liberalisation may be fuelling faster-than average passenger growth as former state-owned airlines go private amid new competition — even as poor governments fail to adapt and oversee the growth.
”You’ve got the general problem of poverty and lack of government capacity. In Africa, everyone is encouraged to privatise, but there is a very important role of the state, strengthening oversight and regulatory mechanisms as you open up the economy,” says Princeton Lyman, a former United States ambassador to Nigeria, currently a Council on Foreign Affairs fellow. ”We’ve gone far in one way, but not the other.”
Even many of Africa’s larger airlines fly secondhand aircraft purchased from overseas.
Many other airlines, particularly in vast Congo, fly rickety old jets or propeller-driven planes, including some old military aircraft converted to passenger aircraft with the addition of plastic patio-style chairs in the hold.
Stories proliferate of outrageous misfortune — like presidents’ wives commandeering entire sections of the now-defunct Air Afrique for shopping junkets in Paris, stranding paying passengers behind.
In Freetown, Sierra Leone, a clown in oversized bowtie and jester’s shoes recounts the safety procedures for the helicopter to Lungi Airport — one of the only modes of arrival, since roads to the facility were all-but destroyed during the civil war.
In 2004, Africa represented 4,5% of the world’s passenger traffic while it had 25% of the world’s accidents, or an accident rate of about six times elsewhere, according to figures from the International Air Transport Association.
One solution might be banning cast-off aircraft from former Soviet-bloc nations. Spare parts can be hard to obtain and some of the aging planes’ upkeep documentation has been lost during the breakup of the Soviet bloc.
”We’ve witnessed accidents in countries with conflict, like Congo, Angola and Sudan. Many of these flights took place in areas outside of government control, so there’s no oversight. We’ve also tended to notice in the past that many aircraft come from the former USSR,” says Elijah Hingosso, an official with Nairobi, Kenya-based African Airlines Association.
”We’re urging governments to stop getting these old aircraft,” said Hingosso, who says passenger growth is running at between 6% and 7% annual growth — slightly higher than the global rate.
Bright spots exist among them, including South African Airways, Kenya Airways and Ethiopian Airlines. Many African pilots who have honed their skills on the continent’s cracked runways are known as skilled navigators of crisis zones. A South African crew runs a route between Amman, Jordan and Iraq’s Baghdad, where the plane approaches the runway in a tight downward corkscrew to avoid ground fire.
But on the runway in Liberia, the Russian crew locked themselves behind cockpit doors of the propeller-driven aircraft shuttling dozens of aid workers, journalists and merchants between Liberia and Ivory Coast.
They neglected to turn on the ventilation system until after takeoff, when the sole and harried cabin attendant banged on the door and told them of the restive, sweat-soaked passengers. At 10 000 feet, gales of frigid air began blowing from vents. — Sapa-AP