Air Uganda (Entebbe) board members have taken the decision to completely disband the airline after the Ugandan Civil Aviation Authority (UCAA) arbitrarily revoked the Air Operators Certificates of all locally-based international carriers in July as a result of what it claimed were safety concerns.
Sources in the Ugandan Ministry of Works and the UCAA who spoke to The East African newspaper on condition of anonymity confirmed that the airline's board had sent a letter to both government departments last week informing them of their decision to disband.
The paper says that despite Air Uganda having recently completed the most critical stages in its recertification process, its prolonged grounding coupled with Kampala's decision to offer the carrier's mainstay Juba route to rivals Ethiopian Airlines (ET, Addis Ababa International) and RwandAir (WB, Kigali) had caused “massive financial and irreparable damage to the reputation of Air Uganda" with the board consequently viewing relaunching as "unviable.”
Founded in 2007, Air Uganda operated three CRJ200s on flights to Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta, Dar es Salaam, Bujumbura, Kigali, Mogadishu, Kilimanjaro, Mombasa, and Juba.
The board is also reported to have dismissed a proposal from the Ugandan government in which it would take a stake in the carrier.
Sources in Entebbe state the UCAA failed its latest Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme (USOAP), carried out by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), earlier this year. In a bid to thwart the issuance of a Serious Safety Concern (SSC) which could have seen the country blacklisted by the European Union as a result, the UCAA moved to unilaterally revoke the AOCs of all locally-based foreign operators - a move that has been greeted with much anger and derision in the local aviation community which accuses the UCAA of incompetence and of trying to cover up its own mistakes.
“In most countries where that has happened, the airlines from that country are blacklisted not to fly to other countries. That is what has happened in DRC,” Air Uganda's CEO, Cornwell Muleya, told the Observer. “When you have these concerns on the authority, it stays for five years until the next audit. So, rather than having that stigma on Uganda for the next five years, CAA decided to withdraw what they had not done properly and ask the airlines to reapply, so that when they work quickly, the industry could recover without suffering for the next five years. It’s not the airlines that are wrong; it is the authority which is deficient. It can’t oversee the sector properly.”
