Air Travel in Africa: Exhilarating, Otherworldly and Perilous

In the wake of the Kenya Airways crash in Cameroon, the AP has taken a look at the state of air travel in Africa. It’s not the first time the media have addressed the safety of flying within the continent post-crash—a quick search turned up a BBC article from 2005 after two crashes in Nigeria, and an International Herald Tribune story covered the safety issue in 2006—and it likely won’t be the last. Is the scrutiny of Africa merited?

Well, the AP says flat out that “Africa’s air safety record is among the worst in the world,” and that IHT story reported that there’s “a program of $150 million in grants and credits to reward those countries in West Africa and Central Africa that agree to work together to improve safety.”

So certainly Africa has issues with air travel. But according to a 2006 International Air Transport Association (IATA) safety report, it’s not the worst region by at least one measure: the number of planes per million taking off that become “unusable as a result of an accident.” The IATA breaks the world into eight regions, and the Confederation of Independent States, which includes Russia and ex-Soviet republics, ranked the worst. Out of every million planes that took off in the region, 8.6 became unusable. Africa ranked second worst. Out of every million planes that took off in the region, 4.31 became unusable.

Is traveling by air within Africa as scary as these quotes and figures might suggest? World Hum contributing editor Frank Bures lived in Tanzania and more recently traveled to Nigeria—see The Sound of Sunshine, Test Day and Things Come Together: A Journey through Literary Lagos for stories based on his experiences—so I asked him about flying in Africa.

“There was a major crash when I was in Nigeria, and another not long after I left. I did also have a plane fishtail on landing once in Tanzania,” Bures said. “But every day there are probably thousands of flights across the continent and crashes are extremely rare. What’s more dangerous to me in Africa are the roads. When I took a bus from Lagos to Ibadan in Nigeria, I had to fill in ‘next of kin’ on my registration for the trip.”

Photo by el7bara via Flickr (Creative Commons)

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* Dangers of the Road

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