Muria
JF-Expert Member
- Feb 17, 2016
- 285
- 186
The East African Airways hangar. All images, unless otherwise stated, courtesy of East African Airways memorial website [Link]
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At first, the explanation didn’t make sense. After Kiniti’s plane was refueled, the other three EAA pilots on the tarmac that day were denied fuel. It’s not that there was no more fuel, it was an order from above. Such orders had become part of an evil game of political ping pong.
For the previous decade, Kenya and Tanzania had been fighting a cold war. Tanzania would deport a Kenyan, then Kenya would find a Tanzanian of equal rank and drive them to the border in Namanga. Then a Kenyan employee at the Mombasa port transferred a massive amount of money from the regional body to a government bank account. Because of the structure of the body, his boss in Dar es Salaam didn’t know about it until it was too late.
EAA staff had grown used to, if not tired of, such fights. Of the airline’s 5000 employees, 3000 were Kenyan.
But this one was different. About a decade before, something similar had happened in the dying days of the Central African Airlines. Ian Smith, ruler of what is now Zimbabwe, grounded the airlines’ planes in Harare as the regional body died. Whoever was left with the most planes had the best chance of building a new airline fast. It helped if they beat everyone else to it, because then they had the chance to fill the void of the dead airline.
On the Dar tarmac that day were four EAA planes, two Douglas DC9s and two Fokker 27s.
The exact instruction was to deny all of them fuel. It should have been to actually stop them from flying, but something else was happening that day.
The two biggest football teams, Yanga and Simba in Tanzania are based in Dar es Salaam. Yanga dons green, yellow and black, while Simba’s color is red, in celebration of its initial name which was simply “Red.” The two have an age-old rivalry that brings the city to a standstill. That day in 1976, it did something more.
The day the Tanzanian government decided to impound all EAA traffic in its airspace was also the same day as a major Yanga versus Simba match. The city stopped, as always, except for bare minimum operations. Airport bosses who should have stopped any attempts by the pilots on the ground thought denying them fuel would be enough to stop them for 90 minutes. What they didn’t count on was the genius of Captain John Kiniti.
According to Bart Kibiti in Memoirs of a Kenyan Spymaster, Kiniti realized what was happening before anyone else did. If there was no more fuel, he offered, the airport staff could siphon fuel from his plane and fuel the two Fokker 27s enough to get them back to Nairobi. The Douglas DC9 is a larger aircraft with more fuel capacity than the Fokker F27s. Since they were flying mostly empty, they needed even less fuel. There was another DC9, but that could wait because it needed more fuel.
Not realizing what they were falling for, the airport staff siphoned some fuel from the DC-9 and loaded it into the smaller planes. In their rationale, they had followed instructions and not fueled them from the airport’s fuel hydrants.
The Birth of an Airline - Owaahh
