August 7th - Flight delays across the world

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

British Airways passengers on an Airbus A380 from Johannesburg to London Heathrow went on a 10-hour “flight to nowhere” when Niger’s airspace was suddenly closed late on Sunday night. Other flights between the UK and South Africa have being re-routed or diverted to take on extra fuel or have returned to their starting points as a result of the closure. Airspace over Sudan and Libya is already closed to commercial aviation. The addition of Niger means there is now a block to north-south flights across Africa stretching around 2,600 miles from western Niger to the Red Sea.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 7th of August.
0:08.3	And the one thing I've learned about travel is that there will always be something that just comes up and bites you,
0:15.4	particularly if you are a traveler trying to get overnight from Africa to the UK because well thousands of people found
0:24.7	their trips in disarray. Let me explain why the airspace over Niger has been closed. That's in
0:33.6	reaction to the coup which took place where the president was disposed and against that he's also got the potential that the people from Eco Was, which is the economic group in West Africa, may be moving in to Niger in order to re-establish some sort of legitimate control.
1:02.9	Now, the thing is that Niger is a vast country.
1:07.1	I've calculated six times bigger than Britain.
1:09.9	And on top of that, it is, along with Libya and with Sudan, off limits to civil aviation.
1:21.1	And that means you've got this enormous block of airspace stretching, I calculate,600 miles from the western tip of niger which is
1:34.2	pretty much on the greenwich meridian don't write in it might be a little bit to the east of that
1:40.7	and it goes all the way across to Sudan's Red Sea shore.
1:46.5	That means there's an awful lot of aviation that needs to fit around the size.
1:51.6	It also means that if you were a pilot flying from Nairobi in Kenya, from Johannesburg,
1:58.8	from Cape Town overnight.
2:05.1	You suddenly found that, because this was just announced very late on,
2:12.2	that all airspace had been closed and that you were not going to be able to fly over Niger. Indeed, one British Airways flight from Cape Town to Heathrow actually did just go into Niger airspace very, very briefly.
2:25.0	I assume that was around the time the instruction was issued and the plane then turned sharp southwest and flew almost the length of Nigeria and finally landed at Lagos Airport to refuel.
2:40.7	Now, it was on the ground for a couple of hours.
2:42.9	The passengers would not have been let off.
2:46.6	Luckily, the crew had enough hours left and that plane has now flown on to the UK.
2:54.6	Similarly, there was a Virgin Atlantic flight that was heading from Johannesburg to Heathrow
3:01.6	that also diverted to Lagos to refuel. About hours late it turned up and then well a couple of
	...

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