Ghana’s aviation blessed with relatively good weather – Airline operator

Dr Brock Friesen, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Starbow Airlines, said Ghana’s aviation industry is blessed to have only about five to ten days of bad weather (Harmattan) every year compared with other countries.

He said countries like Sweden, Norway, Canada and Denmark had to deal with about five months of fog, snow, frost, typhoons and hurricanes, which did not happen in Ghana and added “This is child’s play, compared to other parts of the world”.

Dr Friesen, who was speaking to the GNA in an interview on the effects of the harmattan on operations of the airline, said poor visibility had affected flights of Starbow.

He said an aircraft needed about 1,600 metres of clear visibility to be able to land and that: “Basically, what we do is study the weather forecasts every morning and the most important information is about visibility.

Dr Friesen said the Takoradi Airport was closed due to bad weather and would be closed again this week for other reasons.

He said: “We’ve been quite lucky with Tamale aerodrome because we were able to do almost all our flights and Kumasi was very difficult as no airline could fly on Friday morning.”

Dr Friesen said Starbow had tried to do everything to make sure that its customers were not inconvenienced  and that it had invested in technology to give information to the customers in case of any cancellation.

He said the airline added two aircrafts to its fleets and would begin flights to Abidjan in May 2012 and later to Monrovia, Ouagadougou and Cotonou and some major cities in West Africa next year.

Dr Friesen said:“Our business model has been very successful, we have doubled the market in Ghana in four months, and built an image much larger than the company and so we’re ready to go international. Things have worked out very well for us, there’s a lot of work to be done to go international but we have most of that worked out.”

Source: GNA