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Entebbe airport traffic picks up slowly
The departure lounge at Entebbe Internatioal Airport. Photo | Eve Muganga.
What you need to know:
- Since commercial passenger operations resumed at the airport on October 1, at least 23,867 passengers arrived in the country, 15,461others departed to other countries, while 3,305 were transit passengers, according to the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority (UCAA) records.
Entebbe International Airport facilitated a total of 42,633 passengers both to and from Uganda in the month of October.
Since commercial passenger operations resumed at the airport on October 1, at least 23,867 passengers arrived in the country, 15,461others departed to other countries, while 3,305 were transit passengers, according to the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority (UCAA) records.
“The average number of passengers per day is so far about 1,400. In 2019, we registered a total of 1,980,000 international passengers, which is an average of about 5,400 passengers per day,” Mr Vianney Luggya, the UCAA spokesperson, told Saturday Monitor in an interview on Thursday.
He also said Entebbe International Airport recorded 5,542 metric tonnes of cargo last month, while last year, they recorded 62,000 metric tonnes.
Mr Luggya further noted that there has also been 1,118 aircraft movements (landings and take-offs) in the whole month, an average of 37 per day. Flights over Uganda’s airspace were 842 in the whole month.
“The big difference is attributed to a number of factors. One of the factors is that in the first phase of resumption of commercial passenger operations (October to December 2020), very few flights are being facilitated at Entebbe, an average of one flight per airline per day, yet some airlines like Ethiopian Airlines used to have seven flights per day and Kenya Airways (5 or 6 flights per day) prior to the Covid-19 situation,” Mr Luggya said.
He added: “The other probable reasons as to why the numbers are still low could be a result of the travel phobia occasioned by the effects of the pandemic, and the now stringent travel requirements, which include need for a negative Covid-19 Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test certificate.”
In relation to children, Mr Luggya said: “Clarification has recently been made to the effect that children of three years and below are exempt from having to undertake a Covid-19 PCR test before travel through Entebbe International Airport as long as the accompanying parents have a negative Covid-19 PCR test result.”
A total of 64 passengers during October 1 to October 18 turned up at the airport with either forged PCR test certificate, without or with expired PCR certificates both on arrival and departure. Of these, five were Covid-19 positive.
However, October 18 had the biggest number of cases, with 24 recorded in one day.
“Ever since the airport authorities handed over the last big number of cases recorded in a single day to Aviation Police for further investigation and massively publicised the matter on October 18, the number of cases have drastically reduced with an average of two cases recorded in a week since then,” Mr Luggya said.
