View Full Version : How's Business In East Africa?
Can anybody let me know how things are in Kenya and Tanzania since the flight and travel ban from the UK has been lifted?
I was planning to come out and have a look for work but I have heard that alot of camps have been badly hit by the ongoing drop in tourist traffic since the ban was lifted. As a result there has been a drop in demand for internal flights and subsequently not much flying and no need for new pilots.
Would this be an accurate summing up of how it is at the moment?
Many thanks
Foxcotte
4th Aug 2003, 20:45
Your summation is pretty accurate. Even after 9/11 and the US Embassy bomb blast in EA - things were never as depressed and dead as they are now.
The diplomatic sledgehammer that was the BA refusal to fly into Kenya has had a bigger effect than I think many people ever imagined. Tourism which was beginning to pick up has died again - and estimates put it at 2 years before its back to where it was before the flight ban. In the meantime, people are being laid off, hotels & lodges are closing, companies are folding and aircraft are either having leases cancelled because of lost contracts or are being put into mothballs at the back of hangars.
Its a major down-time and the lucky ones are those that have a secure flying job - for some its a mad scrabble to fly anything for anyone just to keep money coming in and for the rest, well some of us are taking up other pursuits - like web browsing & chatrooms!
Not a good career move at the moment!!
S**T
Best of luck to those that are out there.
Snoop
garymortimer
6th Aug 2003, 04:36
less people at the aero club Wilson. I was a balloon driver in the Mara, interested to know if any lodges have closed there. Heard rumours that they had stopped ballooning at Fig Tree.
Such a shame the UK government shafted the industry there, can't help wondering what the hidden agenda was.
G
Agaricus bisporus
7th Aug 2003, 05:24
"Hidden agenda" pretty obvious, I'd have thought.
Some spineless Foreign Office functionary saw the threat to airlines being shot down at Mombers as potentially killing UK citizens and imagined the poo he'd be in if it actually happened and he had not done something positive to warn/prevent it. Solution? Obvious, to the craven civil service mind! Protect my promotion and pension by showing I had considered the consequences and took preventative "action". Put Kenya on the Do Not Travel list. Problem solved (for me). Screws up thousands of others, but I'm all right Jack!
People like that are what we pay our taxes for.
Paterbrat
7th Aug 2003, 23:01
As a regular visitor and part time resident I could say that the atmosphere in Kenya after the recent elections was very heartening, a mood of 'lets get together and make it work' was very apparent. There have however been situations that were inherited from earlier times and things sadly do not change overnight. There has been a tolerance/blind eye/chai scenario with regard to certain types of visitor who went as far as marrying localy down at the coast in order to further merge in and hide. They were known about and little had apparently been done about them. When specific intelligence was seemingly intercepted and passed on and still nothing was done, then further steps logicaly were taken. The result has been as we saw.
It is sad when measure are taken in such a way, and it has been said that it could have been attended to earlier without the following economic disaster that followed.
Unfortunately human nature is such that sometimes we are asked to do things that we do not feel inclined to do we drag our feet, sometimes nothing happens, but sometimes there are unpleasant consequences that make the earlier request seem the more sensible alternative. Hind sight is so often 20/20.
There have been more than a few imminent threat warnings in both the US and the UK directed towards aviation. Not to mention a mortar bomb attack on Heathrow by One of the Northern Irish terror groups. Didn't stop flights into and out of the UK at the time though!
Not really that fair that the ban happened like it did, coupled with what seems like very little support to those that have been affected worse.
But there again what do I know about what is really going on?