Five people have died after a small plane carrying them from Kenya’s
Maasai Mara nature reserve crashed in the west of the country.
According to Edward Mwamburi, police chief for the Rift Valley
region, “there were five occupants in the plane and they did not
survive”. He said the Cessna plane was heading from the Maasai Mara to
Lodwar, near Lake Turkana and emergency services have been sent to the
scene.
According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA) in
2014, some 130,000 planes land and take off from Kenya each year, and
the country has 35 operating airlines. The IATA said Kenya’s air
transport infrastructure quality ranks 6th out of 37 countries surveyed
in Africa.
In October 2017 five passengers were killed when a helicopter crashed
into Lake Nakuru, while in 2012 a helicopter carrying internal security
minister George Saitoti crashed, killing all six passengers on board.
Kenya’s worst crash in recent years took place in 2007, when a Kenya
Airways flight from Abidjan to Nairobi via Douala crashed into a swamp
after take-off, killing all 114 passengers.