Kenya Airways, Djibouti plane incident blamed on controllers 'habits'

A Kenya Airways jet nearly collided in mid-air two years ago with a private plane carrying Djibouti's president, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The newspaper includes no details on the May 2013 incident in a story revealing dangerous conditions in the skies above Djibouti.

The small country's main airport handles thousands of commercial flights per year and an even larger number of takeoffs and landings of US military aircrafts based at an adjoining installation leased by the Pentagon.

"Conditions at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the base for US pilots flying sensitive missions over Yemen and Somalia, have become so dire that American warplanes and civilian airliners alike are routinely placed in jeopardy," the Post reported.

US Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to visit Camp Lemonnier next week after a two-day visit to Kenya.

Citing official documents obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act, the Post story indicates that the risks of aviation catastrophe are due primarily to the "hazardous habits" of Djiboutian air-traffic controllers.

"Some controllers habitually dozed on the floor while on duty, pulling a blanket over their heads to drown out radio traffic," the Post reported.

"Others immersed themselves in video games and personal phone calls while ignoring communication from pilots. Still others punished US flight crews for a perceived lack of respect by forcing them to circle overhead until they ran low on fuel."

The civilians responsible for overseeing an average of nearly 100 takeoffs and landings per day – more than half involving US military planes –commonly chewed miraa (khat) in the flight tower, the Post said.

Over a three-month period, Djiboutian controllers committed errors involving aircraft operations at a rate 1,700 times greater than the rate in the United States, the Post noted.

"Outsiders who tried to impose order did so at their peril," the report continued. "One Djiboutian supervisor was beaten up by a controller and tossed down the flight-tower stairs. A US Navy officer was threatened with a pipe."

A $7 million US programme intended to improve safety at the airport ended in failure, the official documents are said to show. Djiboutian personnel stopped attending classes conducted by former US aviation officials and locked their trainers out of the flight tower, the Post reported.

The Djiboutian air-traffic controllers were said to be deeply resentful of the drones that fly regular surveillance missions over the Horn. The pilot-less aircraft have also reportedly carried out strikes on targets in Somalia and Yemen.

According to former US government aviation officials whom the Post does not name, the Djiboutian controllers viewed the drones as unreliable and "malign weapons for killing Muslims," the newspaper said.

The Djiboutians often issued edicts forbidding drones from operating at the airport, the Post added. "Tensions over the drones became so severe that the US military agreed to move the robotic aircraft in 2013 from Camp Lemonnier to a remote desert airstrip in another part of the country," reporter Craig Whitlock wrote.

A Djiboutian diplomat rejected the report of air-traffic controllers sleeping on the job, chewing miraa and leaving the tower unattended.

"That's nonsense," Issa Saher Bouraleh, a counsellor at the Djiboutian Embassy in Washington, said in an interview with the Post.

“I’m sure that the airport is safe. It is more safe than other Arab countries.”

If controllers were sleeping on the tower floor or hooked on miraa, Mr Bouraleh told the newspaper, “there would be accidents every day.”