Malawi: Mzuzu Airport's Safety Gaps Exposed After Chilima's Fatal Crash

Mzuzu Airport has been operating for more than ten years without functional air navigation equipment and lacks even basic systems to record radio communications, a parliamentary inquiry into aviation safety has been told, in a startling revelation that raises fresh questions over the airfield's role in the fatal crash that killed former Vice-President Saulos Chilima.

Airport officer-in-charge Joseph Moyo appeared before the parliamentary committee investigating the June 10, 2024 military aircraft crash that claimed the lives of Chilima and eight others, delivering damning testimony about the state of infrastructure at the airport where the doomed flight was due to land.

Moyo confirmed that Mzuzu Airport operates strictly under Visual Flight Rules (VFR), a manual navigation approach relying on pilots' own visual judgment, purely because essential ground-based navigation instruments at the airfield are broken and non-functional.

"Mzuzu is a VFR approach airport because we don't have the navigation instruments. In the past, we had the VOR [Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Range], which was operational," Moyo told the committee.

When pressed by lawmakers on exactly how long the vital navigation equipment had been out of action, Moyo's answer left the committee stunned: the airport has been without functional tools for "more than 10 years" -- an extraordinary gap that has persisted through years of domestic and VIP flights in and out of the facility.

Compounding the infrastructure crisis, Moyo further admitted the airport has no equipment whatsoever to log or record radio transmissions between air traffic controllers and aircraft -- a basic safety and accountability tool considered standard at most modern airports, and one that could have proven crucial in reconstructing the final communications with the ill-fated flight.

The revelations paint a deeply troubling picture of chronic underinvestment at one of Malawi's key regional airports, raising urgent questions over how such critical safety gaps were allowed to persist for over a decade -- and whether they may have played any role in the tragedy that claimed the life of the country's Vice-President and eight others.

Read the original article on Nyasa Times.