Nearly two thousand passengers, among them 49 athletes from the Kenyan athletics team heading to the IAAF Athletics World Championships in Moscow were, on the night of Monday August 5, stranded at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport after the main pipeline supplying jet fuel to the airport malfunctioned resulting in the mass cancellation of flights.
Roughly 67 flights had to be cancelled or delayed after an airlock in the pipe registered a sudden drop in pressure resulting in the starvation of Jet A1 at the airport at 15h00L. Consequently, the airfield was closed for several hours with roughly 1'000 passengers being put up in local hotels.
Normal operations resumed at the airport early on Tuesday morning after the fault was attended to by its owner, the state-owned Kenya Pipeline Company.
During the downtime, flights were diverted to Entebbe and Kigali as airport authorities sought to avert a backlog of outbound flights had the problem persisted.
