Flight Farce

I have to say, I’m quite amazed that I’m even on R&R at all – we’ve had so many issues with flights this week! It wasn’t until Friday morning that it was confirmed that I was actually able to leave Kindu – about 2 hours before I took the plane. Please see below for a long and detailed explanation about why – seeing how much time it took us to sort out, and how it amused me, I’ll write it in full…. Doesn’t mean you have to read it though.

Normally, we fly on UNHAS and there aren’t any issues at all. They fly on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between Bukavu, Goma and Kindu, and it’s fairly fixed which direction they go on which day. They may leave a few hours earlier or later each time, but that’s not normally a problem. Last week, because of the 50th celebrations, they weren’t flying at all. We had staff due to come back from their leave (national staff who come from other parts of the country receive entitlement to return home), so that was delayed until the Monday of the next week. Then it turned out that UNHAS weren’t flying on Monday. So we sent our two staff by boat up to Goma (UNHAS fly Goma-Kindu-Bukavu on Wednesdays), but then late on Tues eve we find out they’re not flying then either. The plane had to go to Entebbe for repairs, and until they received authorisation from the Government that it was skyworthy they wouldn’t be flying – no indication of when that might be.

This causes us a few problems. Apart from our two staff stuck now in Goma (which we’re paying their accommodation each night), I’m due to go on leave on Friday, we’ve been trying to get a staff member whose contract is finished on a plane home to Goma (again since independence celebrations), we’ve got 3 new staff who are supposed to be joining us and our HR officer is supposed to be going to Bukavu for briefing

So we start looking at options. CAA is a more expensive commercial airline, they’ve been approved by the UK as a second resort to UNHAS though we have to get permission from the Programme Director before we use them. Busy Bee is an airline, which another British NGO charter on a biweekly basis between the more remote villages, Kindu and Goma. However, permission to use them also has to come from the UK. So we contact our Acting PD, who contacts UK, who came back to us with permission to use both CAA and Busy Bee the next day. Was very impressed with their response actually – I thought it might take longer.

So on Thurs we try and work out what we want to do, which was a nightmare of communication. Our logistician was out in the field trying to set up a sub-base. The main Bukavu logistician who would normally deal with flights was in the process of travelling up to Goma. The other Bukavu logistics person who was covering was inaccessible for most of the day. The other NGO office we needed to ask was in Goma, which then involved the logistician from our Goma base. The HR officer in Bukavu was also involved, and was trying to find out information for my flights on to Uganda despite not knowing if I would be able to leave Kindu or whether it would be Bukavu or Goma I’d fly to. Our storekeeper was also involved in trying to find the schedule from CAA here in Kindu. Benoit was the person who had to make the decisions on all of this. He also ended up having to co-ordinate it, made more difficult by the fact that the phone network was pretty bad. About 4pm on Thurs afternoon we discover that the NGO in Goma was saying that they didn’t have spaces/it wasn’t possible to go with Busy Bee, and that CAA were saying that they were only flying Kindu-Bukavu as opposed to their normal route of Kinshasa-Kindu-Bukavu-Goma-Kindu-Kinshasa. And it’s over double the price of UNHAS. That wasn’t good for much of anything, and we were thinking that it didn’t look like anyone was flying on the Friday when we thought we’d check with a UN friend of ours who works at the airport who told us UNHAS was back up and running! Then we heard from another person that it wasn’t running… and then by another person that it was… Then confirmed that it was. Fantastic! OK, we’d had all that running round after the other airlines for nothing, but it solved all our problems.

Except it didn’t.

When one of the logisticians (what’s the collective term for a group of logisticians I wonder? A load? A bevy? A fleet?) then tried to book our tickets, they were told that the organisation was suspended due to non-payment.
WHAT?! That couldn’t be right… They sent through the email that confirmed that as of today, we were banned people from UNHAS flights due to the non-payment of a ridiculously large figure which is equivalent to about a year’s worth of flying. Obviously, the Bukavu office immediately started looking into this and scanning and sending the payment confirmations to show that we have paid – it’s looking like there was a miscommunication between the Bukavu and Kinshasa UN offices which should be sorted out shortly.

Benoit and I had a good laugh about the fact that news of us being banned people had come through on the same day as all the rest of the flight debacle, adding the pinnacle to what had already been a farce. However, as the timing of my leave is quite important in how it ties in with other events, Benoit rang a couple of people he knows and somehow managed to get me a seat on the chartered flight with the other NGO – one of the advantages of being an international staff member as I don’t think they would have said yes for a national staff member. It wasn’t completely confirmed until Saturday morning, so I had to ask HR in Bukavu to hold off booking my flights to Entebbe until then. It amuses me to think how far in advance people book and plan holidays to Africa – whilst I book my flights the day before!

There was even a struggle getting to the airport. Unfortunately, one of our staff members stuck in Goma is our driver. Normally, we have two drivers but the second hasn’t yet been recruited, as we have to wait for the Fleet Manager to visit and do driving tests with them. We have one casual who is authorised to drive, but he was taking Benoit to Kalima to set up our sub-base (Benoit’s trip had already been delayed because of lack of driver). Our logistician, the other person who can drive, was also at the sub-base. So how was I to get to the airport? In the end, it was arranged for one of the pastors that we know to come and pick me up. He then had to leave, and I was left to wait for the other NGO people to arrive. I almost missed them as well – they had gone straight through to the runway, and it was fortunate that one of their guys came to find me, took my bag, whisked me through the registration, and 5 minutes later we were in the air. Quickest check-in ever!!!

The inside of the Busy Bee plan. Pretty much the same as UNHAS except it's blue and got pictures of bees everywhere.


Landing at Goma. Always fun to fly low over the high streets.

Was up at 5.30am today, to cross the border to Rwanda and drive to Kigali to take the flight to Entebbe. I’d planned to ring a couple of people from Kigali to confirm my Uganda plans, but unfortunately there’s no signal on my DRC mobile and my UK number costs £1.25 a minute to even receive calls. Whilst there was wireless internet, this doesn’t replace being able to talk to people directly, which resulted in some confusion and uncertainty. That is really my fault for not clarifying things when I had the opportunity to, but all’s well that ends well and here I am sitting in a luxurious resort! All the rest of the staff are still stuck but I’ll be glad that I managed to get out. It was very much of a ‘Oh what a circus, oh what a show’ and a complete farce though!