KQ 507

There's been so much that's gone on locally that now trying to recap it all is too overwhelming. The major story of the past week has been the crash of Flight KQ 507.

Last Saturday, all of the news stations stopped their regular broadcasts and spent many hours reviewing the same, uninformative story: the plane has gone missing somewhere over Cameroon, the plane sent out a distress signal, efforts made to recover the plane have not been successful. The only updates that really came forward that entire day were about the number and nationalities of passengers.

The Kenyan government sent a delegation, headed by the Transport Minister Mwakwere, to work closely with the Cameroonian government on the investigation. The governments have agreed to send the black box to Canada, which is seen as neutral ground. The official reason was that it was neutral because America would be biased to protect Boeing, Europe would be biased against it to support Airbus. Pretty cynical, huh?

Another reason would be that Canada is both a French- and English-speaking nation. Cameroon is French-speaking; Kenya is English-speaking. Also, I'm not sure if either Kenya or Cameroon really has the facilities to do this on their own; or that they would trust the other to do it.

Apparently Kenya had a bad experience with the Ivory Coast in 2000 when its plane crashed in the ocean, killing 169 people. The Kenyan Media reported that the Ivory Coast government shared its findings with the Kenyan Government, but apparently refused to make the report public. Though, a quick search led me to this report...

The 114 who died included nine Kenyans (all employees of Kenya Airways) and one American.

Since then, the focus has been on why the plane crashed just a few miles from the runway and what could possibly have caused it.

It turns out that the American who died was Dr. Albert Henn. He had been working at the Liverpool VCT, which offers unique HIV/AIDS to Deaf Kenyans. A number of deaf Kenyans were distraught at the news and remembered him fondly.

Monday is a national day of remembrance for those who died in the crash.