The Uganda Civil Aviation Authority has carried out a full-scale exercise to test stakeholders’ readiness to respond to a plane crash at Entebbe International Airport.
The two-hour exercise activated at 1309 hours involved simulation of an East Sky Airlines(pseudo name) flight with 95 passengers and 5 crew on board.
The simulated an Embraer 190 aircraft was cleared to land at Entebbe International Airport, but ‘crashed in an area adjacent to the airport’s perimeter fence and caught fire’.
This sparked off an emergency involving airport fire-fighters and other rescue agencies that were called in to ‘save lives.’
It was presumed that ’25 people lost their lives’, 13 of the survivors were injured and 62people were successfully rescued without injury.’
The ‘critically injured’ were rushed to hospitals in Entebbe and Kampala and the uninjured united with friends and families.
Addressing journalists after the exercise, UCAA Director General, Fred Bamwesigye hailed the exercise for being successful.
“I commend the over 600 participants from 50 participating agencies, including airport stakeholders, medical service providers, security agencies, public and private fire-fighting service companies, among others for taking part in the exercise aimed at testing the airport and stakeholders’ capacity to deal with an emergency,” Bamwesigye said.
“It helped us simulate emergence plans, procedures, communication frame works, response timelines and coordination abilities. These things we are talking about( during the drills) happen in real life many areas. We are not inventing something that has never happened elsewhere. We don’t want it to happen and we fumble. We are trying to check ourselves how we can handle them without panicking and failing to do anything.”
Entebbe International Airport last conducted a full-scale exercise in2023.
It involved a bomb threat and a safety-related scenario that simulated an aircraft veering off the runway on touch down and catching fire.
