Homecomers Stranded - As Ghanair fails to fly

About 300 participants to the Homecoming Summit and this week’s Pan African Festival (Panafest) are stranded at the Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) Airport in Maryland, USA, as a result of the national flier, Ghana Airways’ inability to fly them to Accra.

By the time the summit kicked off with a musical concert at the International Conference Centre in Accra, Sunday evening, the Ghana Airways flight expected to fly participants from Baltimore was still on the tarmac of the BWI Airport, with hundreds of angry and frustrated passengers. The passengers, mostly Ghanaians, had expected to arrive in Accra that Sunday night.

Chronicle gathered that Ghana Airways flew in a limited number of the passengers for the summit yesterday morning, but it was not immediately known how long the flight arrangements for the other passengers would take.

The stranded passengers are waiting for Ghana Airways to make alternate arrangements for their flight home. Most of them have their luggage already checked-in on the Ghana Airways flight, which has been sitting on the tarmac in the scorching summer sun since Sunday morning.

The national flier has delayed all flights to its North American destinations throughout this week, Chronicle learned last night. Flights to its European destinations are, however, on schedule.

Chronicle enquiries indicate that the flight from Baltimore was delayed because a forklift being used to lift goods onto the aircraft accidentally punctured the body of the plane, rendering it in-operational.

But while the airline could have checked the passengers into another airline, it asked the passengers to join another flight it dispatched from Accra, Monday morning.

However, passengers who returned to the airport Monday to join the flight to Accra had another disappointment. No plane showed up for the flight to Accra, forcing those who had travelled to the airport from areas outside Maryland-DC-Virginia (out of State travellers) to check-in at hotels at a cost to the airline.

Meantime, Ghana Airways officials in Accra knew that the airline has only three operational aircrafts and could find it tough flying its over-booked passengers to Accra.

The airline’s Head of Flight Operations and Chairman of the Management Task Force, Captain Kofi Kwaka, and Head of Engineering, Mr. Joe Brown, respectively admitted in an interview yesterday that the airline has three operational aircrafts at the moment. But they explained that the airline decided not to immediately charter another airline for the passengers because cost analysis indicated that it would be cheaper to dispatch another flight to pick the passengers from BWI.

“It is cost effective that way,” Kwaka said, adding that the problem with the aircraft would cost the airline $70,000 (about ?500 million) to rectify.

He concluded that Ghana Airways has been trying to charter a flight to fly down the stranded passengers to no avail. In another development, Dr. Kofi Ellison, a Washington DC-based Ghanaian, has expressed dissatisfaction with what he termed “an apartheid style service’ provided by Ghana Airways to its Ghanaian customers in the US.

In an online message posted to a number of US-based Ghanaian websites and sent to this Reporter’s e-mail address, Ellison said:

“Ghana Airways operates TWO check-in lines at BWI airport. One line is for Ghanaians, and that is always one dogo-dogo line, which if it were at the Accra Airport, would snake from the entrance of Kotoka Airport to the Airport roundabout! This line is for Ghanaians only… The other line that receives premium services is for African-Americans and Whites!”

Ellison cautioned the airline to refrain from carrying the Ghanaian mentality of treating foreigners better than Ghanaians, abroad.