Marende’s Challenge More Than Kreigler’s Spin.
By Maina Hatchison.
The person and Office of the Speaker of the Kenya National Assembly, Honourable Kenneth Marende, has propelled debate on aviation safety well beyond the writ of the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority’s (KCAA) ambit. It is instructive that his words, concerns and commission from the Chair and elsewhere were not only reflective but attuned to investigation of local aviation both as a mode of (un)safe transport and a vilified industry.
AT THE HEIGHT OF EMOTIONAL lows following the late ‘Kones – Laboso’ aircraft tragedy, Honourable Harun Mwau – Assistant minister, Transport and MP, Kilome – rose in parliament to plead for patience toward awaiting for a procedural post-fatal accident investigation to adduce the chronology of failed aerodynamics particular to that flight. Members of Parliament were apprehensive about a trend all too visible within the preceding decade. However, Mwau knew that the permutations of a single airplane incident or accident are legion.
That Honourable Clement Wambugu, MP Mathioya, was named to the overseer group of panelists was a pointer to the Speaker’s insistence on the professional rethink on our aviation safety and administrative philosophy. Clement is not only a former airline pilot but a former Air Traffic Controller. Both he and Mwau – a pilot in his own right - know the challenges of both sides of the KCAA and Kenya Aerodromes Authority’s (KAA) omissions and their toll on former pilots etched in accident epitaphs since aviation came to Kenya in 1915.
Kenya’s first person to die of an airplane accident was Maia Carberry on March 12, 1928.
This lady of wings was such a polished pilot that at the material time she was giving flight instructions to a student who perished with her. Shocked settlers and gossip pundits of the Happy Valley set believed she could only have been sabotaged. Short of that they were prepared to credit her eulogy within a suicide farewell.
Needless to remind Kenyan politicians, the first accident involving a Boeing Jumbo B747 happened at Nairobi ’s Jomo Kenyatta (Embakasi – HKNA) airport on November 20, 1974. The Nairobi accident - in which 59 people died - crashed shortly after takeoff. Pilots were blamed outright for inactivated slats and the hydraulics that go along with it.
Not all accident investigations can be expected to touch base with such conclusive realism. Mwau knows that helicopters can crash when the main rotor vortex (down-wash) is deflected by freak winds to the tail rotor. No one would be the wiser if and when a CFIT – controlled flight into terrain – is entered to the disrepute of the pilot.
Likewise Clement knows that in marginal weather while flying in the neighborhood of Cumulus -Nimbus clouds, a pilot – even when aware of local terrain spot heights – may be forced to hug the lowest ‘safe’ altitudes. A singular down-draft (wind shear) might slam the airplane to the ground. Again, no verdict other than ‘controlled-flight-into-terrain’ (CFIT) would suffice there being no evidence of the dissipated CB cloud. A pilot is three times safer flying in the Grand Canyon than entering into an argument with CB clouds. The question begs, why, then, can’t pilots just land at the nearest aerodrome and wait for the weather to improve?
Indeed air law requires a pilot caught up in poor weather to land at the nearest ‘safe’ aerodrome. But do parliamentarians ever take the initiative to force inspection and fund mandatory aerodrome repairs given that they are the ones which enact the Kenya Civil Aviaiton Act in the first place? Isn’t it inimical to cry wolf when one, or two, or a dozen of their own end up victims of omissions fashioned by their ignorance of the aviation tedium?
Kenyatta’s Power and Communications Minister Dr. Omolo Okelo was a pilot. He knew the stakes. He knew that to survive in the air ‘one has to learn how to cheat death on the ground’.
The Honourable Speaker’s initiative should therefore not be left to fizzle with release of the late ‘Kones – Laboso’s report’. The two were victims of our collective neglect. If parliament can concede apprehension from a trend of airplane crashes that threatens frequent fliers in our airspace, why not go the extra mile and constitute a permanent parliamentary aviation commission to outline a continuous vigilance?
Picture this.
In January 1913, a motion was brought before the American Congress imploring the government to form an aviation research body. It was, as expected, defeated because air travel would have threatened the interests of those who had won lucrative long term government and corporate contracts to haul staff, cargo and mail on the courier road, rail and horse trails.
In 1914, World War 1 broke out. Again American aeronautical apologists pointed out how vulnerable America was to attacks from the air. American politicians responded that ‘a European war need not be an American problem’: America had ‘no colonies to defend’ and the Atlantic was ‘buffer’ enough.
The Navy thought otherwise; it was vulnerable at sea!
Navy Assistant Secretary F.D. Roosevelt successfully sneaked back the defeated motion albeit as a military contingency. On March 3, 1915 - under President Woodrow Wilson - an Act of Congress established the National Committee on Aeronautics, NACA.
For the next 43 years, the NACA relentlessly pursued aviation with vigor, patriotism and scientific purpose. It didn’t take long for Americans to dominate not only aircraft manufacturing but air transport and avionics industries.
On Oct 1, 1958, the NACA was disbanded and replaced by NASA, the National Aeronautical and Space Agency. And believe it or not, the NASA story can be articulated on the ‘floor’ better by the Emuhaya MP, Dr. Wilbur Otichilo who believes that ‘by now Kenyans should be launching their own communications satellites.
Were the trio of Harun, Clement and Otichilo given the mandate to jump start our aviation and space pretensions within the 2030 mantra, then the perennial activist and opportunistic opposition fronted by the Namwamba and Martha numbers would no longer bog the nascent industrialization pace of the august House. We must commit ‘this’ parliament to discussing aesthetic and industrial advance. Certainly, it won’t take time before Mwau and Clement build ‘community aerodromes’ in their constituencies. Likewise, if there is a legacy that the people of Emuhaya can grant this country, then it is to prop up the challenge by their two most eminent Sons to give us a new aviation safety formula.
The establishment of a permanent parliamentary commission on aviation is one such.
Mr. Speaker Sir, I beg to move.
END
The writer is a former Air Traffic ControllerKenya DCA (1979 – 87)
now a freelance aviation writer.
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