‘Birds, warthogs endanger planes’

Herald Reporter
December 15, 2009

AIR Zimbabwe aborted a flight to Johannesburg, South Africa a fortnight ago following the invasion of the runway by a flock of birds at the Harare International Airport, while a South African Airways plane hit two warthogs nine days ago during take off.

These incidents took place barely a month after another Air Zimbabwe flight to Bulawayo was cancelled after the plane hit warthogs.

The chief executive officer of Air Zimbabwe, Dr Peter Chikumba, yesterday told the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Transport and Communication that urgent measures were needed to contain the birds and the warthogs around the airport.

“The amount of birds at the airport is scary and we had to abort a flight to Johannesburg after they invaded the runway, the pilot just had to reduce the speed and institute emergency brakes,” he said.

Apart from the birds, Dr Chikumba said a South African Airways plane had also hit two warthogs along the runway nine days ago.

“South African Airways hit two pigs nine days ago and (Parks and) Wildlife (Management Authority officials) came and captured 90 of them,” he said.

Dr Chikumba said only the “Grace of God” had saved the situation when the first accident involving the warthogs occurred.

“We were saved by the Grace of God. God still loves Zimbabwe. We were able to evacuate passengers within 87 seconds when the world standard is 90 seconds. The pilots are already back in service and passenger safety remains our number one priority,” he said.

Dr Chikumba said the flight cancellations and delays caused by the Meteorological Department’s obsolete equipment, was also impacting negatively on their image.

“The impact of that (failure to provide adequate weather information) is that we will have delays. The passengers will loose interest and look for alternatives because unfortunately the problems are put on us,” he said.

He lamented the failure by treasury to allocate funds to the national flag carrier.

“In the National Budget, there was zero provision for Air Zimbabwe and the question will be are we still together?” Dr Chikumba said.

The company needs around US$92 million in the medium term to turn around its fortunes including the ongoing retrenchment exercise and settling debts. Some of the company’s employees have since challenged the retrenchment exercise and the Labour Court recently ruled against the move.

However, Dr Chikumba said the downsizing of staff remained a necessary alternative for Air Zimbabwe given low capacity utilisation.

“Retrenchment exercise is a must because we are operating at between 40-50 percent of our capacity,” he said, adding that the company needed to cut or pull out on some of the routes it was currently servicing because they were not profitable.

At its peak, Air Zimbabwe ferried around one million passengers in 1996.

I'm surprised that they're still operating at around "40-50 percent of [their] capacity". Scary, without the birds and the warthogs.

a better question is why anyone in their right mind would fly Air Zim in the first place. airborn suicide is the only reason i can think of.