Nairobi runway lights go out – Kenya Airports Authority silent

The crucial runway lights failed on the evening of December 9 at Nairobi’s main international airport, Jomo Kenyatta International, halting all incoming and outbound flights for several hours. It is understood from reliable sources in Nairobi that while the runway lights were eventually brought back online at around 0130 hours on the morning of December 10, no immediate explanation was offered by the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) or any other governmental entity until well into Thursday, the following morning.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen flights had been affected and planes bound for JKIA had to be diverted to either Mombasa or Kilimanjaro International to sit out the period of technical fault until services eventually resumed. In other cases, aircraft were kept at the point of origin before being cleared by air traffic control in Nairobi to commence their flights to Kenya.

A similar fate had struck the Mombasa airport a while ago, when for several days the runway lights were out, following the flooding of an underground electricity cable duct, restricting operations at the time to daylight hours and causing a severe impact on the flight schedules in and out of the coast’s main international airport.