Africa, Development & Aid, Headlines, Poverty & SDGs

Worrying Dysfunction in DR Congo Airports

Emmanuel Chaco

KINSHASA, Jul 25 2011 (IPS) - Major operational shortcomings are behind the recent spate of crashes at airports around the Democratic Republic of Congo, raising questions about safety for aircraft and passengers in the central African country.

“In the space of just one year, the country has seen four crashes caused by failure of the weather monitoring services, failures in communication between the control tower and pilots in distress, and by the inadequacy of airports and their installations…” Joachim Jean Paul Ndagano, a flight commander for the government-owned national airline, Lignes Aeriennes Congolaises – the airline’s single aircraft is presently grounded.

“The equipment in the control towers and weather stations, which is supposed to give precise, real-time information on the weather, the atmosphere, the temperature, does not meet current standards for air travel, and this constitutes a serious failure,” says Ndagano.

The most recent crash, of a Boeing 727 belonging to the Hewa Bora airline, took place on Jul. 8, as the aircraft approached the Bangboka Airport, in the northeastern city of Kisangani. It was the third crash suffered by Hewa Bora within a two year period. Seventy-three people were killed, with 47 more seriously injured, according to the report published by the Congolese government.

On July 13, five days after the crash, Stavros Papaioannou, the chief executive of Hewa Bora told a press conference that “responsibility for this crash rests with the RVA [Congolese Air Transportation Board], which on the day of the accident, had assigned trainees to the control tower rather than qualified professionals”.

Responding to Papaioannou’s accusations, Justin Okana N’Fiawi, the managing director of the RVA, told IPS: “No trainee had access to the airport services involved, much less to the control tower, on the date of the accident.”

Martin Kabwelulu, the interim minister of Transport and Communication, said that the plane was overloaded and the RVA’s staff had effectively given the plane the wrong guidance [ie, miscalculated the aircraft’s approach path].

Both versions of events were formally refuted by Godard Mamba Makola, from the Congolese Assocation of Air Traffic Controllers, who told IPS, “Until the final report of the inquiry is made public, responsibility cannot be properly established.”

According to MP Hubert Pierre Moliso, a preliminary report on the crash revealed that the airport’s fire truck took hours to come to the assistance of victims after the aircraft crashed in flames, even though the truck is supposed to follow the aircraft from the moment it touches down, along a road parallel to the runway.

“What were the consequences of this failure and who is responsible?” said Moliso.

Independent sources are also talking about “the disappearance of tape recordings of the conversations between the pilots and the control tower at the Bangboka airport”.

“If in addition to the lack of equipment and adequate infrastructure, there is no principle of accountability for those involved, there will be no way to assign blame,” Moliso continued. “And the distasteful polemic that has erupted between the airline owner and the government on the question of responsibility for the last crash, on Jul. 8, only hides another malfunction in our airports.”

Minister Kabwelulu said that whatever actually transpired in July, “this crash shows that the security of air travel falls far short of meeting the standards for the protection of human life from takeoff to landing of aircraft in DRC”, adding that measures to put safety mechanisms in place in all the country’s airports are urgently needed.

A study conducted by the RVA confirms that most of the country’s airports “suffer from a lack of, or aging, equipment in their control towers and technical departments; [and] from the lack of, or insufficient, fire-control arrangements as well as from inadequate apron areas for parking aircraft”.

According to the March 2011 document, “the electricity supply is not stable, and the systems for refilling fire trucks with water and fire-fighting foam as well as the access routes to the runways in case of a fire fall badly short in most airports, where the aircraft parking areas neither have the required dimensions nor are they set up according to the rules”.