Revealed: Forget Yemen Fighting, Here Are The People Responsible For The Blunder That Caused President Uhuru To Cut Short His US Trip (Photo)
Last evening, the president left the country for Dubai where he was supposed to catch a commercial flight to Los Angeles, USA. The plan obviously didn’t go as it was intended since the head of state came back to the country last night.
Yemen is currently trending on twitter because of what befell the President. He was supposed to connect a commercial flight from Dubai and fly to LA for the 2015 Milken Institute Global Conference.
This was never to happen. According to State House spokesperson Manoah Esipisu, the President was forced to cut short his US trip because of increased military activity in Yemen.
Saudi-led air strikes against Iran-allied Houthi militia rendered Yemen airspace volatile to commercial planes. The flight Uhuru was to use to get to Los Angeles was supposed to fly though Yemen airspace.
That begs the question why didn’t the people responsible for planning the trip do research? They ought to have known Yemen airspace is a no go zone for commercial flights.
But they are not entirely to be blamed for the mess, the Presidential jet is. Funny? I will explain later. Ask yourself why the Uhuru had to use a commercial flight when he has his own Presidential jet.
The answer is simple, the Dutch-made Fokker 70 plane which Uhuru uses has a range of 2,710 km. That means it’s unable to fly the 15,535km journey to Los Angeles without taking several detours to refuel.
Mid air refueling is possible but it is very expensive, plus the country has no air refueling tankers of its own. I also doubt whether the Presidential Fokker 70 plane has mid air refueling capability.
Add all these odds, the only way to get the president to LA is with a commercial jet, a bigger plane that has a longer range.
This is why Uhuru had to be flown to Dubai in his own jet so that he could then connect a commercial flight to LA. But the Saudi air campaign in Yemen barred the President from flying to LA.
It’s time for the country to buy the head of state a bigger craft, see what happened could be avoided if he had something like Boeing 747.
So the people responsible for the blunder that caused President Uhuru to cut short his US trip are the ones who can’t buy him a bigger jet!
