I got no less than five phone calls checking whether I had been obliterated by the airplane that crashed in Kinshasa on Thursday. The answer, clearly, is no.
Yet another Antonov fell from the skies over DRC. That’s at least six since my arrival in November 2005, and another four had crashed just before I arrived, making a total of ten dead Antonovs in less than two years. Not bad!
Fortunately, this one was a cargo plane (although confusingly, it appeared to have as many as 20 passengers on board); unfortunately, it crashed in a populated area of Kinshasa called Kingasani. The latest death toll appears to be over fifty.
Ten years ago, another Antonov hit a Kinshasa market, killing 300.
Another particularly memorable accident happened in 2003 when the rear door of a cargo plane burst open at 33,000 feet, sucking some 150-200 passengers out of the plane. Others survived by clinging on to bags, ropes and nettings as the plane returned to the airport in Kinshasa. One survivor explained that the plane had taken off with the door improperly fastened, then flung open after three failed attempts to fully shut it mid-flight (BBC).
The DRC has accounted for over half of all air crashes in Africa over the past decade, and last year the European Union put all but one Congolese airline on a blacklist. In August, the government suspended the licences of several private local airlines after an Antonov carrying three tonnes more than the recommended cargo capacity crashed in Katanga province. However, my cynical Congolese colleagues suspect that this was little more than an excuse to extract bribes, and that the Minister for Transport has spent the last couple of months signing exemptions from the ban. All be it, he is now fired.
At the risk of being tiresome and repeating for the zillionth time a now-familiar rant, what amazes me is that Kinshasa’s implosion last March registered with absolutely no one outside DRC, and yet this plane crash, the last in a long list of similar but unreported events, has suddenly made the news.
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