Congo Crash Worsens Africa's Air Safety Record

Air Safety Week, April 21, 2008

A DC-9 operated by Hewa Bora, a private Congolese air carrier, crashed while attempting to take off from the airport at Goma, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on April 15.

The jetliner reportedly blew a tire and suffered an engine failure during departure with the DC-9 traveling through an airport fence, coming to rest in a crowded marketplace. By the end of the week, the death toll stood at 44 with 146 injuries, but many of the 79 passengers and six crewmembers aboard the DC-9 survived with serious injuries.

The governor of the Nord-Kivu province said in a phone interview with CNN that his administration has asked the central government several times to fix the airport's runway, which was shortened six years ago when a volcano eruption destroyed nearly half of the city of Goma.

And the pilot of the plane told United Nations officials that engine failure and the shortened runway contributed to the crash. The pilot, who is hospitalized, told U.N. officials he tried to abort the takeoff after one of two engines failed.

The jetliner had been headed to the central city of Kisangani and then to the capital, Kinshasa, 700 miles to the west.

The European Union recently added Hewa Bora to its blacklist of carriers. Although all other Congo carriers had been previously banned by the EU, Hewa Bora operated a weekly flight to Belgium "under a special arrangement." That flight was halted because of safety violations. Congolese authorities had not suspended the airline, but that will probably change in light of the fatal accident.

An Antonov An-26 turboprop on Oct. 4, 2007 crashed into a residential market area of Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital, destroying homes and killing at least 19 people, including the three Ukrainian crew members, all the passengers on board and others who were in the teeming neighborhood located three miles from Ndjili International Airport.

The transport operated by Africa 1, a Congolese carrier, had just taken off from the airport en route to central Congo. Investigators will attempt to determine the cause of latest crash in Africa where aircraft are often old and poorly maintained and flown by pilots from former Soviet states.

In 1996, a Russian-made An-32 crashed after takeoff from Kinshasa's airport, plowing into a crowded open-air market. The crash killed as many as 350 people in the nation's worst air accident.

Africa 1 is on the European Union's airline blacklist. All Congolese air carriers, except for Hewa Bora Airways, are banned from the EU.

The continent has the worst air safety record based on the number of fatal crashes per million departures in the decade, 1996 to 2005. In the first half of the decade, Africa registered 3.6 fatal crashes per million departures. In the second half of the decade, that number rose to five.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, has a dismal aviation record. There have been 10 plane crashes in the nation since February of last year, resulting in 76 deaths -- not including the April 15 crash -- according to Aviation Safety Network.

Only one other region of the world had a rising fatal crash rate, the Middle East, increasing from 0.5 to 1.8 fatal crashes per million departures. Meanwhile, Latin America, with the second-worst safety record, dropped from 2.4 to 1.7 fatal crashes per million departures. In contrast, the United States, with the best safety record, declined from 0.7 to 0.4 in that period.

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